Cover

Story

Hardik A Gohel
Assistant Professor, Faculty of Computer Applications (FCA), Marwadi Education Foundation Group of Institutions

Looking Back at the Evolution of the Internet

Introduction
World Wide Web, mostly known
by its abbreviation WWW and
universally known as Web, has
plaiting solution variety for various
problems and for gathering global
audience information requirements.
Web is an interlinked hypertext
document system via internet, also
dened as network of networks,
for multimedia access. Since 1989,
Web is the highest data ordnance in
existing world and providing main
force for large scale of Information
Communication Technology &
Networking (ICTN). It is a very
tough job to analyse large content,
usage patterns or hidden content
structures. Further crucial job is to
generate knowledge from it. World Wide
Web was invented by Tim Berners-Lee
then and after 20 years rst connection
was established known as Internet. Many
scientists with Tim at CERN, Switzerland
participated in experiments of exchanging
data and results which were otherwise
difficult for them and that helped Tim
understand the unrealized impending
demand of millions of interconnections
of computers through internet. At
present, Tim is director of World Wide
Web Consortium, abbreviated W3C and
working to add semantics in existing web.

Fig. 1 : First website

other experts to share data, information,

documentation and news.
Fig. 1 shows snapshot of CERN website,
the rst website created in November 1992
which was publicly announced in August
1991. There was still no browser with
graphical UI existing for NeXT. This gap was
lled with Erwise, an application developed
by Helsinki University of Technology, Finland
and ViolaWWW by Pei-Yuan Wei in 1992
with ads on feature of scripting, graphics as
well as animation.

History of Web
Tim-Berners-Lee built ENQUIRE, during
1980, as a personal database of people in
which hypertext and software utilities for
accessing database was key stream. The
main objective was global sharing of data
without presentation software as well as
common machine. First development by
him was NeXT Workstation. Then after rst
web server and page with support of HTTP
and web browser named World Wide Web
was a project by itself. Rather than NeXT
it was modied further to be used on
other machine. On 6th August 1991 there
was a short summery posted by BernersLee on the project of WorldWideWeb
on alt.hypertext newsgroup. The project
intended to allow all links to be accessed
from anywhere with any information, and
for that they invited energy physicists with

CSI Communications | September 2014 | 22

There was rising interest in the

development of web browser after
incorporation of graphical, scripting
as well as animation concept in web
browser. Netscape Navigator was based
on the Mosaic web browser which was
rst graphical web browser. Then W3C
(World Wide Web Consortium) was
founded by MIT (Massachusetts Institute
of Technology) in 1994 with support of
DARPA (Defence Advance Research
Project Agency) as well as European

Fig. 2 : First Web Browser - MOSAIC browser V.1 released in April 1993

www.csi-india.org

Table 1 : The Evolution of the web

Year
1991
1992
1994
1995
1996
1997
1998
1999
2002
2003
2004
2005
2006
2007
2008
2009
2010
2011
2012

Growth of web in Browsers & Technologies

HTTP (Hyper Text Transfer Protocol)
HTML 1 (Hyper Text Mark-up Language Version 1) & MOSAIC The rst web browser
Netscape with HTML 2
Opera & Internet Explorer (IE)with concept of Cookies & SSL
JAVA with JavaScript as an HTML 3
Flash & XML and HTML 3.2
HTML 4 with CSS2
AJAX
SVG
Safari Browser
Firefox Browser
Canvas, Initial version of Opera Mini
XMLHTTPRequest2
First Iphone released with Safari Browser
Chrome Browser with HTML 5 and Request Protocol Handler as well as Offline web Apps : AppCache
CSS3 with 2D & 3D Transforms and Animation, Geolocation
Date & Time Input types, Audio-Video elements, CSS3 Flexbox and Index DB and First Firefox Browser for Mobile
Touch events, Chrome OS v1, Web RTC, File System API, WEB GL(Inbuilt Graphics support)
Chrome for Android Beta released, Content security policy, Full Screen API, CSS3 Filters, Web Audio API,

Commission. At the end of 1994 web

was made freely available by Berners-Lee
without claiming patent and royalty due
which has motivated people to publish
information online and instantly for
worldwide consumption. At present, web
has opened doors for direct web based
commerce. The utilities like search engine
and emails reached to common man.
Social networking includes facebook,
blogs, tweeter, LinkedIn and other popular
web-based applications are examples of
web evolution. There are some typical
areas of web utilization that include online
learning and tutorials, E-Governance,
E-Commerce, services and manufacturing
as well as research and development.
The table 1 shows evolution of web in
the terms of technology as well as browsers.
Now let us refer WWW in the terms of
invention includes social networking, tweets,
blogs, wikis and videos.
Video Web Evolution
Shareyourworld was the rst website for
sharing video in 1997. There were many
plagued problems because of not having
advanced internet technologies and
shareyourworld is no longer available
since 2001 due to bandwidth as well as
nancial problems of the company. It was
started by Chase Norlin who is head now
at audio/video search company pixsy.
Chase takes us down memory lane, during

the last internet boom when he launched

shareyourworld whose time was not quite
right. In the interview with Andy Plesser
(2007), Chase talks about challenges in
bandwidth. He wonders about success of
YouTube which picked up but this was not
possible for him in 2001. Video sharing
sites were not accepted until YouTube.
YouTube changed video sharing forever.
On 14th February 2005 YouTube was
launched by 3 former PayPal employees
Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim.
Me at the Zoo, in Fig. 3, was the rst
video of YouTube which was uploaded at
8:27 pm on Saturday 23rd April 2005. The
video was having very poor quality and it
was shot by Yakov Lapitsky at San Diego
Zoo on elephants. The duration of video
is 18 seconds. Presently, high denition
(HD) video with high quality of resolution
is available and streaming of video also
uses intelligent web aspects. Additionally,
there are web applications which
generate professionally produced videos
automatically by using patent-pending
cinematic Articial Intelligence technology
as well as high-end motion design.
Web Based Electronic Mail Evolution
Email is as old as ARPANet or Internet. It
was not invented but has evolved from
simple to highly digital form. After the
foundation of WWW, two companies - one
is Hotmail and another is Yahoo - made

emails available with friendly web interface.

Hotmail was the rst email service of email
founded by Sabeer Bhatia and Jack Smith.
The limitation for storage was 2MB only.
In December 1997 more than 8.5 million
subscribers were there with Hotmail.
Hotmail previously ran on Solaris for mail
services and Apache on FreeBSD for web
services. After 1997 Hotmail is now known
as MSN Hotmail due to its tie-up with
Microsoft Corporation.
Rocketmail, Now Yahoo Mail, was
founded by Yahoo in March 2002 which
was paid mail service with charge of
$29. Yahoo Mail was having new design
with additional features. Later Hotmail
included dropdown menus in DHTML

Fig. 3 : First video of YouTube

CSI Communications | September 2014 | 23

and different categories of tabs with new

user customization in colour schemes. In
November 2002 Yahoo launched Yahoo
Mail Plus which was also a paid service
proving high storage capacity and other
additional features like attachments and
multiple domain sending, ltering of
addresses and its storage.
Google mail, abbreviated with
Gmail, is a free email service run with
the support of advertisements as well
as Email clients. It has been founded in
2004 by Paul Buchheit who explored the
idea of web based mail in 1990. Google
started its work on Gmail in August 2001.
Yahoo and Hotmail, who were ruling the
market at that time, were using HTML
which requires reloading entire webpage
to provide different services. In Gmail it
is given feature of HTML with supported
JavaScript which is known as AJAX.
Furthermore Google mail is having high
storage capacity, which is now available
in Yahoo and Hotmail too, but Gmail is
providing advanced search capabilities.
Email evolution continues till date.
Todays research direction says that
email service should improve in terms of
knowledge mining to provide workow
enhancement. It also includes machine
learning lter, smart screen and spam
trigger for more security.
Social Media Evolution
Social networking sites are web based service
that helps to construct public or semi-public
prole within bounded system. The rst
site of social networking was SixDegrees.
com created in 1997 which allows students
to create proles and list their friends. The
purposes of these sites were to provide
online dating of different proles with each
other. Classmate.com allowed people to
affiliate with their high school and college
buddies with surng facility of other list. In
2000 the service of SixDegrees.com was
closed. During the period from 1997 to 2001
there were many community tools available
with support of combination of proles and
publicly articulated friends. AsianAvenue,
BlackPlanet and MiGente allowed users
to create professional as well as personal
prole for dating.
In January 2004, Orkut, social
networking website was launched by
Google Inc, and was made available
worldwide in September 2004. The
service was designed to help users to
maintain existing relationships as well as
to create new relations. The creator of
Orkut is one of the employees of Google
named Orkut Bykkkten. It was the

most popular website in Brazil and India

Google+ service was invented by
with 48.0% and 39.2% users respectively.
Google with Invitation only feature in
The numbers of users in US were only
2011. The purpose of invention was to
2.2%. Users of Orkut can add videos in
give an invitation to increase number of
their proles form YouTube and Google
users for Google circle which was the old
Videos. The supplementary option is
name of Google+. But because of having
creating restricted or unrestricted polls
limitations to send number of requests,
for polling community of users. There is
Google has now launched Google+ for the
one integrated option with GTalk enabling
users having age of 18 years and above
chatting and le sharing with like button.
without having any kind of invitation.
On June 2014 Google announced closure
Wiki Evolution with Wikipedia
of Orkut by upcoming September.
Service that enables to add information to a
Facebook is a synonym of social
centralized place in attractive manner from
networking presently. It was founded by
different locations by multiple users with
Mark Zuckerberg in October 2003 with
collaborative web platform is known as
the name of Facemash. Previously it was
Wiki. In this, user doesnt require any kind
for Harvard University only. Later on it was
of training. This concept was introduced by
expanded to other colleges in Boston area
Ward Cunningham in 1995 as The Simplest
and then afterwards it was made available
online database that could possibly work.
worldwide. In February 2004 Facebook
He has given the name WikiWikiWeb.
service was been launched by Facebook
This is also known as writable web as well
Company. It was based on HOT or NOT
as open editing concept.
game for Harvard students which allowed
Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger,
visitors to compare two pictures side by
American entrepreneurs and founders of
side and let them choose who is HOT and
Wikipedia, launched Wikipedia in January
who is NOT. At present, Facebook with
2001. Previously in 1993 Rick Gates gave
792,999,000 visitors is a leading social
the concept of online encyclopedia but
networking website because of its unique
actual free encyclopedia was proposed
features that include News Feed, Friend
by Richard Stallman, president of free
and Unfriend capabilities, Wall, Timeline,
software foundation, in the year 2000. The
Like, Messages and inbox Notications etc.
project named as Wikipedia, previously
It also supports applications such as Event,
Nupedia which was not a Wiki, with
Marketplace, Notes, Places, Platforms,
domain Wikipedia.com was started on
Photos, Videos and Facebook Paper. Some
January 2001. Server located at San Diego
of the group functionalities are like listen
was donated by Bomis. Bomis was dot
with friends, Facebook live, Mood faces,
com company that supported free online
Poke, URL shorter etc. From March 2011
content. Many former employees of Bomis.
onwards Facebook started supporting 70+
com contributed content to encyclopedia.
languages to prop up global audience.
In February 2001, totally 1000 articles were
There are other sites of social media
received by the project. It reached up to
such as Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+,
10,000 in September and 20,000 within a
MySpace which are very popular. Small
year. Then afterwards, there was a ratio of
messages, known as Tweet, become
1500 articles per month and in August 2002
popular by social networking site Twitter
number reached to 40,000. Presently in
Inc., at San Francisco. It was created
English Wikipedia total number of articles
by Jack Dorsey in 2006. Jack Dorsey is
is 4,583,831 with 33,571,242 pages and
very reputed businessman in USA, and
835,702 les. There are total 731,253,050
an American software architect as well.
edits since the beginning and number of
Twitter.com site offers to post messages
users is 22,202,218. In Wikipedia there
online up to 140 characters long.
are 1,401 administrators who are handling
LinkedIn is another popular social
Wikipedias 129,524 active users.
networking
website
Table
2
:
Service
stacked
up against Competitors (in 2011)
founded in December
2002 and launched in
May 2003. This site is Sr.No
Worldwide
Unique Visitors (in 000)
available in 20 different 1
Facebook
792,999
languages and is having 2
Twitter
167,903
259 million users across
3
LinkedIn
94,823
the world. Jeff Weiner is
Google+
66,756
the CEO of LinkedIn who 4
5
MySpace
61,037
was previously working
6
Others
255,539
with Yahoo.

CSI Communications | September 2014 | 24

www.csi-india.org

Study of Web Generation

Web 1.0
In 1990s the rst generation of web
has introduced with Netscape browser.
As we have discussed in introduction
section the purpose of this web was free
information sharing online. This web was
very unattractive with slow turnaround, low
quality of pictures, unreliable web hosting
as well as email, terrible customer services,
not or very little search engine optimization.
Web 2.0
Second generation of web was beyond
static web pages as well as web design. It
allowed users to interact and collaborate
with one another. The concept of Web
2.0 was initiated in late 2004. Although it
suggests new version of World Wide Web,
it not only includes technical specication
but also cumulative changes to the web.
Web 2.0 includes social networking sites,
blogs, wikis, video sharing, folksonomies,
hosted services and web applications. Web
2.0 allows users to do much more than
mere retrieving of information. Instead of
only reading information users can publish
comments and their views in articles. They
can create proles with login and password.
There are browsers with user friendly
interfaces, application software and le
storage facilities. Therefore, web 2.0 is also
called network as platform computing.
Client side web, known as web browser,
in Web 2.0 used Ajax and JavaScript
framework for continued integration of
users with web pages. Server side web
in Web 2.0 includes same languages of
web programming or designing but, with
attractive data format. In Web 2.0 it is
possible to share data among multiple sites.

About the Author

Web 3.0 (Semantic Web)

Web 3.0 is also known as semantic
web and it is a mutual movement of
W3C (World Wide Web Consortium)
international standard. Semantic web is
an attempt to enhance current web so that
computers can process the information
existing on WWW, understand and x
it, help humans to discover required
knowledge. It is proposed to form a huge
distributed knowledge based system to
share data instead of documents. In other
words, we can say that semantic web is a
common framework which allows data to

be shared and reused across applications,

enterprises and community boundaries.
The aspect of semantic network was
thought about by cognitive scientist Allan
M. Collins, linguist M. Ross Quaillin and
psychologist Elizabeth F. Loftus in 1960 in
many publications to represent semantically
structured knowledge. Tim Berners-Lee
coined the term semantic web to extend
the network of hyperlinked human readable
content (web pages) by inserting machine
readable content (metadata) about pages
and their interaction by enabling agents to
access the web more intelligently as well as
perform tasks on behalf of users.
A Web of data that can be processed
directly and indirectly by machines is
semantic web Tim Berners-Lee
Future of Web (Web Intelligence / Web
Wisdom)
Presently, Millions of developers are
creating and using web in their desktop,
tablets, phones, televisions, automobiles,
digital billboards, watches and everywhere.
According to Tim Berners Lee, very soon
millions of sensors, appliances and other
devices will take web to new places. He
has mentioned that future of web is under
threat from governments who are likely to
misuse their power, from businesses who
try to destabilize open market and from
criminal activity. The future of web depends
on normal people talking with responsibility
for tremendous resource and on challenging
those who seek to manipulate web against
the public good. Tim has also mentioned
that the improvement of the infrastructure
to provide additional functional, robust,
efficient and available service web will
play very pivotal role. Furthermore, future
web, apart from being a space browseable
by humans, will contain rich data in a form
understandable by machines, thus allowing
machines to take a stronger part in analyzing
the web, and solving problems for us.

[2]

[3]

[5]

[6]

[7]

[8]
[9]

[10]

[11]

[12]

[13]

[14]

[15]

[16]

[17]

[18]

[19]

References
[1]

[4]

Tim Berners-Lee on Past, Present and Future of

Web at http://www.w3.org/People/BernersLee/1996/ppf.html (Accessed on 17th August
2014).
History Of Web (2014), Available at: http://
webfoundation.org/about/vision/history-ofthe-web/ (Accessed: 25th July 2014).
Tim Berners-Lee (2013) Frequently asked
questions, Available at: http://www.w3.org/

[20]

People/Berners-Lee/FAQ.html#Influences
(Accessed: 25th July 2014).
Tim Berners-Lee: WorldWideWeb, the rst Web
client, Available at http://www.w3.org/People/
Berners-Lee/WorldWideWeb.html (Accessed:
30th July 2014).
Berners-Lee, Tim (1991) On Qualiers on
Hypertext links... - alt.hypertext. Accessed on
11th July 2012 by Wikipedia.
Browse the rst website using the line-mode
browser simulator, Available at http://linemode.cern.ch/www/hyper text /WWW/
TheProject.html (Accessed on 30th July 2014).
Evolution of the web, browsers & Technologies,
Available at http://www.evolutionofthe web.
com/#/evolution/day (Accessed on 1st August
2014).
Sajja P S, Akerkar R (2012) Intelligent Technologies
for Web Applications, 1 edn., USA: CRC.
Invention of YouTube and the First Video
sharing site Ever.(2013) http://www.chess.com/
groups/forumview/invention-of-youtube-andthe-rst-video-sharing-site-ever (Accessed on
12th August 2014).
Andy Plesser (2007) First Video Sharing Site
Paved the Way for YouTube ShareYourWorld.
com Was There First to Launch Ten Years Back
http://www.beet.tv/2007/07/first-video-sha.
html (Accessed on 12th August 2014).
Hartley, Matt (2010). Ten of YouTubes
most inuential videos. Canwest Global
Communication, Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
In Portuguese (2014) Adeus ao Orkut by
Google on June 30, 2014. (Accessed on 13th
August 2014).
Paulo Golgher (2014), Tchau Orkut, available
at http://en.blog.orkut.com (Accessed on 13th
August 2014).
Matheus Thomaz (2014), History of Orkut, at
http://socialnetworks-tsi.blogspot.in/2011/06/
history-of-orkut.html (Accessed on 14th August
2014).
Eric Eldon (2001), ComScore: Google+ Grows
Worldwide Users from 65 Million In October To
67 Million In November at http://techcrunch.
com/2011/12/22/googlesplus (Accessed on
14th August 2014).
Danah M Boyd, Nicol Ellison (2010) Social
Network Site: Denition, History and Scholarship
at http://www.danah.org/papers/JCMCIntro.pdf
(Accessed on 14th August 2014)
The Inventor of Email at http://www.
inventorofemail.com/history_of_email.asp
(Accessed on 14th August 2014).
Ian Peter (2004) The History of Email at
http://www.nethistory.info/History%20of%20
the%20Internet/email.html (Accessed on 14th
August 2014).
The Brief History of Social Media at http://
www2.uncp.edu/home/acurtis/NewMedia/
S o c i a l M e d i a / S o c i a l M e d i a H i s t o r y. h t m l
(Accessed on 14th August 2014).
Mahesh Mohan (2013) Gmail vs. Outlook.com
vs. Yahoo! Mail: An Ultimate Comparison at
http://www.minterest.org/gmail-vs-hotmailoutlook-vs-yahoo-mail (Accessed on 14th
August 2014).

Hardik A Gohel An academician and researcher, is active member as well as secretary of Computer Society of IndiaRajkot Chapter. He is
also devoted Assistant Professor of Faculty of Computer Applications (FCA) at Marwadi Education Foundation Group of Institutions. His
research spans Intelligent Web Technology, Applications and Services. He also focuses on How to make popular, Articial Intelligence
in study of Computer Science for various reasons. He has 22 publications in various impactful Journals and proceedings of national and
international conferences.

CSI Communications | September 2014 | 25