The period after the Second World War would see a time of rebuilding across Europe. Western society would remain conservative after the disastrous consequences of the changes in the 1920s and 1930s. Using many of the technological advances made during the war people would go on to invent the things that the 20th Century will be remembered for. Culture in the 50s moved on as television boomed in popularity and the film industry started exploring new areas such as science-fiction and horror. With the invention of the electric guitar popular music moved from traditional bebop and jazz and moved into blues and rock and roll, artists such as Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly and Elvis Presley lead the way as music looked to rebel against the conservative culture of the time.
The 1960s were the time when younger people looked to break away from the culture established by their parents and the decade has since become known as the Swinging Sixties. Drug use among young people hit an all-time high. The social revolution that formed out of the sixties was a reaction against the US involvement in Vietnam, the Cold War and widespread anti-war sentiments. The social changes during this time would eventually lead to more equality for women, black people and homosexuals. The time was not without its political problems however, with America’s continued war in Vietnam proving unpopular along with the assassination of Martin Luther King and President John F Kennedy.
The 1960s saw significant strides made in technology, building on those of the previous two decades. In 1961 Yuri Gagarin, a Russian cosmonaut, became the first man to orbit the Earth in a spacecraft. Just eight years later the American crew of Apollo 11 were the first people to land on the moon. Neil Armstrong was the first man to walk on the satellite, and the first man to walk on an object other than Earth. Early computers started to take shape and the first programming languages were written.
Over the following decades social change would not be as radical but continue to be evolutionary in nature. The heavy drug using culture would cross over into the 1970s but would eventually die down after many campaigns to warn about the health effects of sustained drug abuse. The 1970s saw great leaps forward in physics theory with Stephen Hawking publishing a number of theories on black holes. Many probes including the Voyager spacecraft were sent to the outer reaches of the solar system during the 70s as our understanding of space grew.
The 80s and 90s would see the collapse of communism in Europe with the break-up of the Soviet Union and the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. East and West Germany would return to a united Germany and many new countries were created in the Eastern bloc. Some were formed in bloody conflicts and others, such as the Czech Republic and Slovakia, were formed peacefully.
The 1990s were characterised by the rise of the Internet and power of computers and communication technology. Bill Gates, the head of Microsoft, would become the richest man in the world during the 90s on the back of the success of his company’s operating system, Windows, which was installed on the vast majority of the world’s computers. His dream of a PC on every desk was realised during this decade and Internet access would increase exponentially over the decade as more and more houses connected to the web. The mobile phone was another one of the major cultural changes during the decade. Although invented in the 1980s, the mobile phone reached practical sizes and prices during the 90s, ending at almost 100% market penetration in developed countries at the turn of the century.
At the end of the twentieth century fears of a global computer crash at the turnover to the year 2000 proved to be falsely held and no problems were encountered. Population of humans had reached 6.1 billion and global warming and environmental damage would go on to be a major concern in the 21st Century after a hundred years of heavy industry began to take its toll.
The major world-changing event of the early 21st Century occurred on the 11th of September 2001 when Al-Qaeda terrorists hijacked four civilian aircraft and crashed them into the World Trade Centre in New York, the Pentagon in Washington DC and the last into a field in Pennsylvania. The attacks destroyed the World Trade Centre and caused almost three thousand deaths.
The USA were quick to respond, declaring a war on terror and would subsequently invade Afghanistan and Iraq, hoping to remove Al-Qaeda and its leaders. They still have not captured Al-Qaeda’s leader, Osama Bin Laden, but they were successful in removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq. Hussein was later sentenced to death by the Iraqi government and executed on December 30th 2006. The decade has been marred by further Muslim extremist attacks against countries in the West that they see as oppressing their freedoms. Bombs were detonated in Madrid in 2004 and in London in 2005.
Against the backdrop of the war on terror technological advances made substantial advances. Personal computer development and the Internet continued to make great progress with broadband access available across much of the civilised world. Space exploration and scientific discovery would continue. Despite the setback after the disintegration on reentry of Space Shuttle Columbia NASA carried on with its space program. In 2008 the Phoenix Lander touched down on Mars much further North than any other probe and was tasked with finding signs of water on the Red Planet. Also in 2008 the Large Hadron Collider was switched on at CERN in Switzerland with the hope of discovering the secrets behind the Big Bang.
There have been an unusually large number of natural disasters in the early 21st Century with 310,000 people dying in the tsunami caused by an Indian Ocean earthquake. There were also many deaths from Hurricane Katrina and powerful earthquakes in Peru, Kashmir and China. With global warming, terrorism and over-population beginning to cause problems at the start of the century humanity must find ways to alleviate these problems as the world population is set to hit nine billion by 2050.
Over recent years the Web has grown into an integral part of every day life. If you’re of the same generation as me, born in the 80s, it is hard to imagine life without it. Used for everything from entertainment, mail, news, work, commerce, communication and everything in-between, the Web has found a way to be ingrained in everything we do from day to day.
In my memory the net has gone from simple text html documents on a 28k modem to full streaming video and audio on mobile devices via wireless broadband. The Web isn’t all that old though, and the growth has been staggering for the short time that it’s been around.
Here I should point out the difference between the Internet and the World Wide Web. The Internet is the series of interconnected networks that provides the backbone for the Web and all other communication technologies to operate. The Web is the series of interconnected documents, typically the web pages that you visit.
Despite the prevalence of the Internet and the Web in almost everything now, it isn’t actually very old at all. The technology that powers the Internet is older than the Web, which was actually started in 1990 by Sir Tim Berners-Lee. The Internet was already widely used within academic and military circles in the USA at this point, but what Burners-Lee did was create a means with which people could easily browse documents and access information from their computer. By December 1990 he had created the first browser, WorldWideWeb, as well as the first web pages, which were documents detailing the nature of the Web.
By 1991 web servers began popping up all over the world, and testing had begun on the first universal browser that would allow anyone to access the documents stored on the Web. In 1992 there were 26 servers in the world, and by 1993 there were over 200. In February of that year Mosaic was released, the browser that allowed anyone that owned a PC or a Mac to access the Web. From this point the growth is staggering.
By 1994 Netscape had been formed and released their first browser, Netscape Navigator while Microsoft had released their Windows browser, Cello in 1993. At this stage the Web was still in its infancy, and in May 1994 the first International WWW Conference was held at CERN, a year after they had decided that use of the Web would be free-to-use and royalty-free, a major factor in its success.
By 1995 the ever expanding Web was starting to pick up momentum and gain some attention in the media and popular culture. By this point Netscape Navigator was the most commonly used browser, but Microsoft had licensed Mosaic to use as the basis for their own browser, Internet Explorer, which would be bundled with Microsoft Windows 95 Plus.
New versions of each browser were released in quick succession to keep up with the new technologies and demands of their ever increasing user-base. In 1997 Microsoft released Internet Explorer 4, which was faster than before as well as allowing a much more dynamic display of information. The browser also integrated itself into Microsoft’s dominating OS, Windows.
Microsoft would go on to use its monopoly on home operating systems and its massive budget to crush the competition from Netscape in the following years as versions 5 and 6 of Internet Explorer completely dominated the market. Netscape eventually released the source code of Navigator as an open source browser, Mozilla. This would eventually lead to the creation of the Firefox browser, now a significant rival to Internet Explorer.
By 1998 most companies had realised that with all the commercial benefits and opportunities that the Web could bring that a website was no longer optional, but required. This would lead to the much hyped ‘dot com’ boom and bust of the turn of the century.
Low interest rates in 1998-1999 would help tempt venture capitalists into investing in dot-com businesses that were seeing their stock values rise extremely quickly. This lead to remarkable situations where start-up dot-coms could be worth millions despite never having made a profit, or in some cases never even having taken any revenue.
The boom lasted into the year 2000, where the stock value of the technology rich NASDAQ Index peaked at more than twice its value from the previous year. On March 10th the dot com bubble burst. Massive multi billion dollar sell orders for companies such as Cisco, IBM and Dell were all processed on the March 10 weekend, this selling prompted a chain reaction as investors found themselves past Y2K without incident and so spending was reduced.
The failure was also undoubtedly linked to the poor showing of Internet companies during the Christmas 1999 season. Their lavish spending and valuations now seemed foolish and most of the dot com businesses went out of business throughout 2001.
The fallout of the dot com era was a large amount of overcapacity on many Internet networks, as well as cheaply available high speed broadband. From the ashes many companies did manage to find a successful niche online and started to form stable businesses. Google, Amazon and Ebay are excellent examples of this.
2002 would see the advent of user driven content, and the real start of Web 2.0. Up until this point the Internet was generally something that you could browse and view, but not edit. Websites would be built by companies and organisations with the intent of users reading them from their computers.
As websites such as MySpace and Facebook began popping up, so did the popularity of instant messaging services such as ICQ, MSN and AIM. During the early 2000s the Web would undertake a shift from being commercially driven to being built around interpersonal communication. Many people began seeing the Web as a cheap and easy way of keeping in contact with friends and relatives. As more and more homes were connected to broadband the Web became integrated into the personal computer and the Internet became the primary communication tool for millions.
2002 also saw the advent of the blog and RSS feeds. A blog enabled just about anyone to have their own personal space online that was easily editable. Previously owning and running a website was the domain of people with sound technical knowledge and a grasp of HTML. With blogs just about anyone could start a site and create something where their voice could be heard. This would essentially bring the Web to the masses as people realised that traffic online could be a two-way thing.
Around the same time Google was rising to prominence as the premier search engine. Google would help to organise and clean up the Web for people. Using complex search algorithms Google attempts to rank pages based on their relevancy and reputation. Their streamlined search page enabled users to find what they were after in the sea of content available online much more easily than before.
In 2005 YouTube was founded by three ex-PayPal workers. The website hosts user-uploaded videos in a quick loading format based on Flash that enables people to watch videos on just about anything. YouTube proved to be the fastest growing website in history. The site now hosts 84 million videos, with 3.75 million user channels. YouTube was a significant step forward for the Web and user-generated content.
Since 2005 the Web has exploded with all kinds of user-generated material. Recently it has been social networking sites that have seen the most growth, with Facebook proving to be an international phenomenon. These sites enable users to have a much more personal connection to the Web than previously. With people using the Web as their sole means of communication while sharing photos and video it has become totally ingrained in everything that we do.
As the flood of user-generated content continues to grow it is hard to predict where the growth will stop, if at all. This kind of content is what has enable the Web to reach the point it has reached now. In just 18 years it has gone from the domain of nuclear physicists and computer scientists to the domain of everyone. Even people with little to no computer knowledge can browse web pages, or set up a blog.
It’ll be interesting to see where the Web will go next. With Web 3.0 just around the corner many people, including Sir Tim Burners-Lee are predicted the advent of the Semantic Web, where the Web will understand and satisfy the requests of people as they search and surf. I imagine the Internet will merge into every facet of technology and entertainment in the future, even more so that what is happening today.
It is an interesting time and also interesting to note that the reason people buy a computer now is not to compute, but to use the World Wide Web.
