1979

A World Wide Web

The invention of the first computers in the 1950s made it possible not only for faster computations for scientific and engineering applications in Earth sciences and other disciplines, but also for wider communications among individual scientists and their research groups. The earliest computers were so-called mainframe systems with a bulky central core of processors that was accessed from a terminal. At first the terminals were co-located with the mainframe, but then as they started to get more distant (an office on another floor, a building across campus), computer scientists had to devise protocols and standards for multiple terminals to communicate with the central hub, as well as with each other.

In the 1960s, the initial concepts and methods of establishing an expanded interconnected networking system, or internet, were developed. These included the idea of sending short packets of data formatted in ways that everyone agreed upon, and assigning special computers called routers to deliver these packets to their intended destinations. During the 1970s, small internets were being established between leading computer-science universities as well as among US government organizations such as the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). And then, in 1979, computer scientists developed a specific standard way to send text-based news stories and messages among specific users on the internet. That same year, a company called CompuServe began to offer internet users of both mainframe and newly emerging personal computers the ability to send electronic mail using this standard. The internet as we know it today, and the Information Age, were born.

Major advances in speed, bandwidth, and routing have followed in the decades since. Another important milestone was the development in 1989 of software tools and protocols that would allow information on the expanding internet to be stored and viewed by others on specific nodes or pages of what was dubbed the World Wide Web. Today, “the web” has gone global, and the internet is accessible everywhere on the planet (though it is censored in some countries) to anyone who can afford a “terminal” such as a cellular telephone, laptop, tablet, or personal computer. Science, education, politics, and our civilization in general have all been profoundly changed by enabling access to the expanding web of all the world’s knowledge.

Like a spider’s web, the world is now more electronically interconnected than ever before.