Jack's Internet
Connection
~~Jack
Teems, Neat Net Tricks
I
Thought You'd Never Ask
Just
in case you need a little practice before you get on that show with
Regis, here’s a “Fastest Finger” exercise for you:
Arrange
the following in the order in which they occurred, with the earliest
event first:
-
The
Beatles play for the Queen of England.
-
Dr.
Strangelove introduces theatergoers to nuclear holocaust.
-
U.S.
Survey probe lands safely on the moon.
-
Marc
Andreesen is born.
-
The
Internet is conceived.
Everything
in this list is in the proper sequence except one. Conception
of the Internet preceded all the other events and occurred in 1962
when the RAND Corporation began work into setting up communication
networks for military command and control. Soon after, a
Department of Defense agency developed a small network known as
ARPANET to share data among researchers within the United States.
In 1969, 4 universities were connected on ARPANET, Stanford Research
Institute, UCLA, UC Santa Barbara, and the University of Utah.
Although the networking was intended to share data for research,
email quickly became the most popular application and continues as
the leading use of the Internet today.
As
early as 1973, ARPANET, then with 23 hosts, had gone international
by connecting to the University College in London and the Royal
Radar Establishment in Norway. The first commercial version of
ARPANET opened in 1974 and as the decade wound down, the Internet
began to move away from military and research applications,
eventually winding up in nearly everyone’s home.
Now,
if you need some trivia for the next cocktail party, remember these
tidbits:
-
Queen
Elizabeth sent her first email message in 1976. Although
the backbone of the Internet was created much earlier, the
actual term “Internet” was not used for the first time until
1982. The term “cyberspace” was coined in
William Gibson’s novel “Neuromancer” in 1984 when there
were just over 1,000 hosts on the Internet. That number
climbed to 10,000 in 1987, one million in 1992, and, in 1996, 10
million in 150 countries around the world.
-
The
first Internet worm was unleashed in 1988 and in that same year
new words such as “hacker,” “cracker,” and “electronic
break-in” became a part of our language.
-
The
World Wide Web was born in 1991 but did not really become
available to us until 1993 with Mosaic, the first graphics-based
Web browser. That one single development accounted for a
341,634% growth rate in traffic that year.
-
In
1994, Pizza Hut made history by accepting orders for a mushroom,
pepperoni pie with extra cheese over the Net.
Oh,
and who is Marc Andreesen? He and a group of student
programmers at the University of Illinois drew up the plans for that
first browser, Mosaic.
Likely
without even consulting Al Gore.
Note
from Jack:
I'm
afraid that I will be unable to regularly write for ABC through the
next few months. I will be on the road by mid-October through Iowa,
Indiana, then through the Gulf states and back through Houston,
Dallas, and finally wintering in Mesa, Arizona. If things lighten up
a bit after November, I might be able to dash something off to you,
but I'm afraid to commit at this point because my plate will be
rather full.
Note
from Linda: Have a great trip Jack...we sure hope to see
you again when you return!!
Jack Teems' Neat Net
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