The Internet This lecture is taken from: From the world brain to the world-wide web Annual Gresham College BSHM Lecture November 2006 Martin Campbell-Kelly University of Warwick and Visiting Professor University of Portsmouth It can also be found in his book: Computer, A History of the Information Machine Slide 2 Introduction Overview The world wide web has evolved into a universe of information at our fingertips. But this idea did not start with the internet it had earlier precedents: H.G. Wells world brain in the 1930s Vannevar Bush s memex in the 1940s s man-computer symbiosis There are many histories of the world wide web and the internet. In these, we see the internet as a revolutionary development in the late twentieth century, perhaps with roots in the 60s. This is fair in one sense, but it is more than this: it is plays an important role in the evolution of the dissemination of information. In that sense, the internet has as its ancestors the great library of Alexandria, or the printing press of William Caxton. Slide 3 Slide 4 Introduction The three people under consideration today dreamt of an internet-type system BEFORE it was a technical reality. Each of these men had a vision, plus a practical agenda for use when the technology arrived. Since the web appeared in 1991, it has changed the way most of us live from day to day, but most people are unaware of its history Isaac Newton talked about mathematicians seeing further because they stood on the shoulders of giants people such as Descartes. Wells, Bush and Licklider are three modern-day equivalents. Slide 5 Slide 6 1
H.G. Wells well-known now (War of the Worlds, The Time Machine). He was famous world wide in the 1930s as a novelist. Several of his books became Hollywood movies. In 1938, a radio broadcast of The war of the worlds caused a mass panic..! Wells was a leading socialist, a popular lecturer and broadcaster. He was born in Kent, U.K. in 1866, one of five sons of a shopkeeper. Although apprenticed as a draper by day, he studied by night, and won a scholarship to study biology under T.H. Huxley at the Royal College of Science (now Imperial College). He became a teacher, science writer, then novelist, publishing scores of books. Slide 7 Slide 8 The notion of a world brain crops up in several novels, but we will look at two. His non-fiction work Outline of history, 1920 told the story of civilization from antiquity to the end of World War One. The work, wealth and happiness of mankind was written in 1932 an economic, educational and cultural study of human beings and their institutions. The desktop image was very important to him, with an array of books and encyclopaedias lying on top of it. Comparison with scholars at Library of Alexandria. Slide 9 H.G. Wells and the world brain He wanted information to be indexed, and go out to people, instead of them having to come to libraries. In his The work, wealth and happiness of mankind book, he first discussed his idea for the world brain. Picture of the reading room of the British Library a cell of the world s brain, made up of all the world s libraries. He came up with a taxonomy (classification scheme) for organising all this information, (inspired by e.g. Diderot s Encyclopaedia) Slide 10 World Brain 1938, page 54: The general public has still to realise how much has been done in this field, and how many competent and disinterested men and women are giving themselves to this task. The time is close at hand when any student, in any part of the world, will be able to sit with his projector in his own study or her own convenience to examine any book, any document, in an exact replica. He believed the world was sliding into war because of the ignorance of the masses, and that his world brain could bring education to many. Book World Brain 1938. Sought sponsorship for his project from the U.S.A. He was impressed that the new technology of microfilm was being harnessed to capture rare books. He died, depressed about WW2 in 1946, aged 80. The Palace of Green Porcelain in The Time Machine ruin of a library. Slide 11 Slide 12 2
According to Campbell-Kelly, Bush was one of the most important scientific administrators of the twentieth century. In the 1940s he was a well-known public figure in the U.S.A., not remembered today. He was born in 1890 in Massachusetts. His hobbies included messing with electricity, mechanics and photography. In 1909 he enrolled at college to study engineering. Slide 13 Slide 14 Here he developed an interest in mechanical computing systems. As an undergraduate, he patented a profile tracer a computing machine to trace the earth s shape. Worked for General Electric, then taught at his old college. Saved up, then studied for PhD at MIT. Continued to work at MIT as instructor. Worked on new area of power networks. He completed his Differential Analyser in 1931. Analyser extremely important inter-war machine a dozen copies made in U.S. and U.K. He was an outstanding administrator worked as Dean at MIT, then was Head of Carnegie Institute, Washington. 1941, America entered war, and Bush became chief scientific advisor overview of A-bomb, radar and code-breaking. Slide 15 Slide 16 The Memex By the end of 1943, he felt that the most important thing was access to information, which was generally so hard to find, or may be secret. He had the same idea as Wells using microfilm to store content of dictionaries, libraries in compact form. He designed the memex memory extender. Published in Life in 1945. The following image is an icon in the history of multimedia computing. Cover of November 19 1945 Issue, In which Memex was introduced Slide 17 Slide 18 3
The memex in use The memex comprised a wooden desk with an automatic microfilm reader and two page-sized projection screens. It also had an indexing system and a book-marking system, making it essentially a 1945 web browser. Books are accessed swiftly using codes, then a system of levers allows rapid leafing through the pages. A particular button takes him straight to the index, thus producing a system that is far quicker than simply reading a book. Slide 19 Slide 20 He was an expert on Longbows, and uses them in his example where he creates a trail of items about them, including his own comments. This ability to link across texts was taken up in the 1960s and was called hypertext. The memex was never built. A machine was built to store navy inventories, but it was an expensive failure. In1967, he wrote in his memoirs that it was still in the future, but not so far. He know it needed cheap computers. Slide 21 Joseph Carl Robnett Licklider (1915-1990) is often called the Father of the Internet. This is a reasonable claim, since much of the personal computing and information environment today is as described in his seminal paper Man-computer symbiosis, 1960. He was born in Missouri, only child of an insurance salesman. He loved engineering, especially tinkering with cars. Studied mathematics, physics and psychology! PhD in acoustic psychology. Worked at Harvard. Slide 22 1950 taught at MIT, and brought in psychology program for engineers (!) revolutionary idea, especially for 1950s. Psychology very important, as crucial for Apple as the software programmers. MIT Licklider got involved in the SAGE program (see lecture 6). Human-Computer interaction was an important part of this, and led to the SAGE console. Task separation computer supplied information which was interpreted by humans. Paper - Man-computer symbiosis, 1960. Symbiosis means interdependence trees and insects, insects and animals etc. Person would get information from computer, computer would manipulate information. Terms word processing and spreadsheet not yet invented. His vision then comprised exactly what we have today, only it was not at all obvious back then. Slide 23 Slide 24 4
Political background Russians had launched space satellite Sputnik in 1957, which put America on the back foot. In response, U.S.A. established the Advanced Projects Research Agency (ARPA), to develop military technologies. 1962, ARPA founded an Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO) to develop computer technology, with Licklider at the helm for a two-year stint. His projects had a great effect on personal computing. He gave money to MIT for project MAC a time -sharing system with 30 people at terminals accessing a mainframe computer. He also funded several other time-sharing projects most important, Douglas Englebart s Knowledge Augmentation Laboratory at the Stanford Research Institute. (See readings for week 6&7.) Slide 25 Slide 26 Licklider and Englebart both familiar with Bush s memex, and set out to make something similar a reality. Englebart Mother of all demos (1965), invented mouse, interacting with documents on screen, cut and paste. When Licklider finished his twoyear term, he passed on to someone with similar vision. 1970, four time-sharing computers were connected over a network the ARPA network, or Arpanet. Slide 27 Electronic mail bound these four together. By 1975, >100 computers. By 1990, 300,000 computers, and renamed the internet. By 2000, over 100 million computers attached to internet. Slide 28 Conclusions Conclusions The emphasis on the individual accessing information has been a key feature of today s lecture. Hypertext and multimedia computing were inspired by this quest for information. The cheap PC of the 1980s paved the way for computer games, and interactive learning in schools. CD-ROM encyclopaedias were produced. PCs generally not networked just little islands. The internet in the 1990s flourished because of Sir Tim Berners-Lee s world-wide web. He developed it in the CERN physics laboratory in Geneva. WWW marriage of hypertext and the internet. Wells and Bush did not see the first computers, but surfing the web is as Bush imagined with his longbow scenario. Yahoo and Google are the type of indexes that Wells anticipated. Tim Berners-Lee Slide 29 Slide 30 5
Conclusions It is probably fair to say none of the three pioneers could have imagined the huge economic impact of the web. They saw information flowing to the individual. They did not foresee e -mail, buying online etc. Slide 31 6