The World Is Flat

HOMEWORK #2

Who is Tim Berners Lee? (not in book)

Tim Berners-Lee whose complete name is Sir Timothy John Berners-Lee, was born on the 8 June 1955 in London, England. He is the inventor of the World Wide Web initiative which he started in 1989 for his own use as a researcher at the European Laboratory for Particle Physics (known as CERN) in Switzerland.

Berners-Lee has a background in text processing, real-time software, and communications. He developed his first hypertext system, “Enquire,” in 1980. Soon after developing the WWW, in 1991 Berners-Lee first specified hypertext markup language (HTML) as part of the WWW initiative to facilitate communication among high-energy physicists. The specification continued to evolve quickly to meet the requirements of the WWW community. What began as an electronic library system for a group of physicists has turned into an international bazaar of information. Berners-Lee was responsible for the development of three standards that weave documents into the WWW. One, URLs (uniform resource locators) are the standard for pointing to documents anywhere on the Internet. Two, HTML is the standard for highlighting documents with URLs to hyperlink them to other documents in the WWW. Three, hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP) is the standard for transferring hyperlinked documents from WWW servers to WWW clients.

Berners-Lee left CERN to found the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which has centers at CERN and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). MIT made sense to Berners-Lee as a home base partly because the center of gravity of Internet research is in the United States, and partly because MIT has a track record of honorable consortium behavior with industry to develop broadly useful, public standards such as X Windows.

Recent development of the WWW is due largely to the efforts of Berners-Lee and MIT’s Laboratory of Computer Science (LCS). The W3C is a vendor-neutral forum for developing and formalizing WWW standards. The goals of the consortium, which Berners-Lee directs, are to coordinate development of the WWW and to maintain its interoperability over time, without any major discontinuities. The W3C also conducts research to determine the WWW’s future and provide reference implementations of WWW software. The consortium also hopes to address security issues, such as message integrity, authentication, and privacy.

Recently, in November 2009, he launched the World Wide Web Foundation in order to “Advance the Web to empower humanity by launching transformative programs that build local capacity to leverage the Web as a medium for positive change.”

What is the history behind ARPAnet? (not in book)

ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network), created by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) of the United States Department of Defense, a future-oriented funder of ‘high-risk, high-gain’ research, was the world’s first operational packet switching network, and the predecessor of the contemporary global Internet. The packet switching of the ARPANET was based on designs by Lawrence Roberts, of the Lincoln Laboratory.

ARPANET was formed with an emphasis towards research, and thus was not oriented only to a military product. The formation of this agency was part of the U.S. reaction to the then Soviet Union’s launch of Sputnik in 1957. ARPA was assigned to research how to utilize their investment in computers via Command and Control Research (CCR).

Now, packet switching is the dominant basis for data communications worldwide, then was a new and important concept. Data communications had been based upon the idea of circuit switching, as in the old, typical telephone circuit, wherein a dedicated circuit occupied for the duration of the telephone call, and communication is possible only with the single party at the far end of the circuit. With packet switching, a data system could use one communications link to communicate with more than one machine by disassembling data into datagrams, then gather these as packets. Thus, not only could the link be shared (much as a single post box can be used to post letters to different destinations), but each packet could be routed independently of other packets.

Who is Dr. Douglas Engelbart and why was he so important to the technology revolution? (not in book)

Douglas Engelbart was born on the 25 January 1925 in Portland, Oregon. He is a legend in the computer world. He is the inventor of many common devices and ideas used in computing today, including “word processing,” “outline processing,” “screen windows,” the “mouse,” and the “text link.”

His lab at SRI was responsible for more breakthrough innovation than possibly any other lab before or since. Engelbart had embedded in his lab a set of organizing principles, which he termed his “bootstrapping strategy”, which he specifically designed to bootstrap and accelerate the rate of innovation achievable.

What fueled the DotCom Boom? (in book)

What fueled the dot-com boom was when Netscape became public. As in the book « What Netscape did was bring a new killer app-the browser-to this  installed base ofPCs, making the computer andits connectivity inherently more useful for millions of people. This in turn set off an explosion in demand for all things digital and sparked the Internet boom, because every investor looked at the Internet and concluded that if everything was going to be digitized-data, inventories, commerce, books, music, photos, and entertainment-and transported and sold on the Internet, then the demand for Internet-based products and services would be infinite. This led to the dot-com stock bubble and a massive overinvestment in the fiber-optic cable needed to carry all the new digital information.

Define these terms. FTP, HTTP, HTML, SSL,SMTP POP, XML (in and out of book)

FTP : File Transfer Protocol, the protocol for exchanging files over the Internet. FTP works in the same way as HTTP for transferring Web pages from a server to a user’s browser and SMTP for transferring electronic mail across the Internet in that, like these technologies, FTP uses the Internet’s TCP/IP protocols to enable data transfer.

FTP is most commonly used to download a file from a server using the Internet or to upload a file to a server (e.g., uploading a Web page file to a server).

HTTP : HyperText Transfer Protocol, the underlying protocol used by the World Wide Web. HTTP defines how messages are formatted and transmitted, and what actions Web servers and browsers should take in response to various commands. For example, when you enter a URL in your browser, this actually sends an HTTP command to the Web server directing it to fetch and transmit the requested Web page.

The other main standard that controls how the World Wide Web works is HTML, which covers how Web pages are formatted and displayed.

HTTP is called a stateless protocol because each command is executed independently, without any knowledge of the commands that came before it. This is the main reason that it is difficult to implement Web sites that react intelligently to user input. This shortcoming of HTTP is being addressed in a number of new technologies, including ActiveX, Java, JavaScript and cookies.

HTML : short for HyperText Markup Language, the authoring language used to create documents on the World Wide Web. HTML is similar to SGML, although it is not a strict subset.

HTML defines the structure and layout of a Web document by using a variety of tags and attributes. The correct structure for an HTML document starts with <HTML><HEAD>blog<BODY> and ends with </BODY></HTML>. All the information you’d like to include in your Web page fits in between the <BODY> and </BODY> tags.

There are hundreds of other tags used to format and layout the information in a Web page. Tags are also used to specify hypertext links. These allow Web developers to direct users to other Web pages with only a click of the mouse on either an image or word(s).

SSL : short for Secure Sockets Layer, a protocol developed by Netscape for transmitting private documents via the Internet. SSL uses a cryptographic system that uses two keys to encrypt data − a public key known to everyone and a private or secret key known only to the recipient of the message. Both Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer support SSL, and many Web sites use the protocol to obtain confidential user information, such as credit card numbers. By convention, URLs that require an SSL connection start with https: instead of http:.

SMTP : Short for Simple Mail Transfer Protocol, a protocol for sending e-mail messages between servers. Most e-mail systems that send mail over the Internet use SMTP to send messages from one server to another; the messages can then be retrieved with an e-mail client using either POP or IMAP. In addition, SMTP is generally used to send messages from a mail client to a mail server. This is why you need to specify both the POP or IMAP server and the SMTP server when you configure your e-mail application.

POP : Short for Post Office Protocol, a protocol used to retrieve e-mail from a mail server. Most e-mail applications (sometimes called an e-mail client) use the POP protocol, although some can use the newer IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol).

XML : Short for Extensible Markup Language, a specification developed by the W3C. XML is a pared-down version of SGML, designed especially for Web documents. It allows designers to create their own customized tags, enabling the definition, transmission, validation, and interpretation of data between applications

and between organizations.

Summarize the story of Brian Behlendorf and what was his significant contribution to the technology revolution (in the book)

Brian Behlendorf was born on March 30, 1973 in Pasadena. His parents worked at IBM. He went to a public school and graduated from Berkeley in 1991. He has always been into computers. He is a technologist, computer programmer, and an important figure in the open-source software movement. His first exposure to the open-source was in 1989 when a friend gave him a copy of a program he had downloaded onto a floppy disk, called ‘Fractint.’

He was a primary developer of the Apache Web server, the most popular web server software on the Internet, and a founding member of the Apache Group, which later became the Apache Software Foundation. Behlendorf served as President of the Foundation for three years. Behlendorf has served on the board of the Mozilla Foundation since 2003.

His Apache server played a key role in the expansion of the world wide web.