This is the 11th of of 23 presentations in a series introducing and outlining my hypertext book project, "Application Holy Wars or a New Reformation - A Fugue on the Theory of Knowledge. The project explores the interactions of technology and cognition in the extraordinary evolutionary history of the human species. In presentation I show how a universally accessible library for the body of human knowledge emerged from what started as defense projects to interconnect various projects so they could share computer resources and to harden digital communications against nuclear warfare. Tonight's topics cover: ● ARPANET and the invention of addressable digital communications ● Vannevar Bush, Memex, and the revolutionary invention of hypertext ● Revolutionary tools for authoring, managing, and delivering hypertext ● Exponential growth of the web and web content ● Using the Web's automated cognition for assembling and retrieving relevant knowledge

1. Session 11: Episode 3(3)
—
Birth & explosion of the World
Wide Web
William P. Hall
President
Kororoit Institute Proponents and Supporters
Assoc., Inc. - http://kororoit.org
william-hall@bigpond.com
http://www.orgs-evolution-knowledge.net
Access my research papers from
Google Citations

2. Tonight
 From the point of view of information science, the last session
considered how the growth of knowledge overwhelmed paper-
based libraries and how computers changed scholars’ personal
access to published knowledge
 Tonight we begin to explore how the Internet and World Wide
Web grew from research into broad-scale communications
networks into the technology that now gives billions of people
nearly universal access to the bulk of externally preserved
knowledge in the world.
2
Episode 3(3) – Birth & explosion of the World Wide Web
The World Wide Web
Web Origins and History
Vannevar Bush’s Memex
Tim Berners–Lee Invents the World Wide Web
Basic Web Tools
The Web Explodes
How Much Knowledge Does the Internet Access?

3. Was the communications
infrastructure of the
Internet invented to
retain command &
control after a nuclear
war?
—
Hardware, standards, applications
(glossed over in the book)

4. Some think DARPA invented the internet to help
command and control survive a nuclear first strike
 ARPA/DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency)
– Established 1958 to formulate and execute research and
development projects to expand the frontiers of technology and
science.
 Packet-switching vs direct point-to-point networking
– Data streams cut into standard sized blocks wrapped in header information
used by interface message processors (routers) to direct the contents to a
particular destination
– One sending device can direct packets to many different destinations & vice
versa
– Video: Computing Conversations: Vint Cerf on the History of Packets
– 1968-9 research project to develop packet-switching interfaces
between different ARPA labs so computer resources could be shared
– Packet switching offered a solution for slow & unreliable connections
 Needed to cope with multiple paths
 Packets arriving out of order
 Lost packets
 Duplicated packets (i.e., same packet received via different routes)4

5. Growth in technology and interconnections
 First ARPANET message sent 1969, reached East Coast 1970
 1972-1982 Gov’t funded research & infrastructure
– Backbone interconnecting universities & research labs
– Standards for exchanging text & digital data
 1971 FTP (File Transfer Protocol) with many improvements over time
 1973 Email (based on store & forward technologies)
 1981 National Science Foundation (NSF) funded the Computer
Science Network (CSNET). Connected additional CS depts.
 1982 Internet Protocol Suite standard (TCP/IP)
– End-to-end connectivity specifying how data should be packetized,
addressed, transmitted, routed and received at the destination.
– Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) controls assembly & disassembly
of packets for network transmission
– Internet Protocol (IP) controls addressing
 Video: Vint Cerf TCP/IP 40th Anniversary Event (11:48)
– Made it possible to inter-connect networks = “Internet”
 Video: How did 'internetworking' become THE INTERNET? (with Vint
Cerf)5

6. Exponential growth of host numbers largely driven by
data & knowledge sharing (email & file sharing)
 Hypertext adds cognitive
links / relationships to the
Internet
– Includes a variety of
knowledge objects in the
cognitive structure of a
document
– Content begins life of its
own6
Internet Protocol (TCP/IP)
introduced 1982
ARPANET
Hypertext Transfer
Protocol (HTTP)
Hypertext Markup
Language (HTML)
World Wide Web
Web browsers:
Mosaic &
Netscape
Partial map of the
Internet on the
January 15,
2005
See also
Lumeta map (2006);
http://internet-map.net/

7. Web applications
—
What is the infrastructure
good for?

8. Key ideas: Vannevar Bush’s Memex
 Vannevar Bush
– engineer
– WWII Headed U.S. Office of Sci Res & Dev’t (OSRD)
– initiation and early administration of the Manhattan Project
– 1945 Atlantic Monthly article “As we may think”
 Memex – see Life Magazine take on it
– Bush developed concept in 1930’s
– Based on storing, indexing, & retrieving
microfilm images
– Based on indexing textual/visual object
to one-another as the knowledge worker
developed concepts
– Applied concept of “associative memory” to understand relationships
of content objects (mapping of memory of an object against other
objects)
– Also included ability to annotate all relationships or links
 Basis for hypertext/hypermedia concept developed by Ted
Nelson & Doug Engelbart8

9. Invention of the World Wide Web
 Tim Berners–Lee (1989-91)
– Hypertext as an organizational knowledge management system for
preserving & managing knowledge at CERN
 “a ‘web’ of notes with links (like references) between them is far more
useful than a fixed hierarchical system… to allow a place to be found for
any information or reference which one felt was important, and a way of
finding it afterwards” [1990. Information Management: A Proposal]
– Concept included application independent standards for
 HTML – markup tags to encode document formats & components defined
using a simple SGML document type description
 HTTP – a request-response protocol implemented in the client-server
computing model
 URL – (1992-4) a way to express and locate the unique address for a file
that is accessible on the Internet
– Two types of applications give life to the standards
 Browser – end-user ‘client’ application for retrieving, presenting and
traversing information resources on the World Wide Web
 Web server – system storing, processing and delivering web pages to clients
via HTTP9

10. The Web transforms a communications infrastructure
into a knowledge repository
 Application independent standards for use by anyone
 Authoring tools to create content
– Text editors - SGML, HTML, XML are all expressed in ASCII
characters so can be written using any character-based editor
– WYSIWYG editors try to show what the page will look like
– Structure editors show logical structure as well as WYSIWYG
 Web servers to provide content
– Single PC in a home office
– Server farms, e.g., Google probably has more than 2 M servers
 Browsers , e.g.,
– NCSA Mosaic (1993)
– Netscape Navigator (1994)  Firefox (2002)
– Windows Explorer (1995)
– Apple Safari (2003)
– Google Chrome (2008)
 Search & retrieval engines
10

11. Content is useless if it cannot be found
 Discovery tools & retrieval tools are essential
– Web directories were initially important but now essentially extinct
 Generally human curated catalogs of websites organized by some
conceptual categorization, e.g., DMOZ, Yahoo Directory
 Labor intensive and difficult to administer
– Automated search engines – technologically complex, vastly powerful
 Web crawler visits linked web pages under control of policy to collect
metadata and content for indexing
 Indexing engine indexes web pages by content, metadata, and perhaps
other factors such as numbers of ingoing and outgoing links according to
search engine specific policy
 Query processing applies input from user against actively maintained
indexes to identify relevant web pages and returns links to these pages
to the user.
 Rise and fall of the web portals
– Attempt to syndicate and provide access to range of information
retrieval & display tools via a single “easy to use” web page (e.g.,
Yahoo, Bigpond)
– For search, simplicity (e.g., Google), won the day
– Portal technology still provides front-ends to corporate intranets11

12. Search engines and
web portals were the
killer applications
that caused the Web
to explode

13. Fuel for explosive infrastructure growth
 Web (and Internet) highly subsidized by the US government
– Communications infrastructure
– Storage
 major fractions of the knowledge being placed in the Web were
freely available to end users
 Fuelled by the growing epistemic value of the content that can
be retrieved essentially for free, the Internet's rate of growth
was unprecedented in human history
– soon grew beyond anything
that was economically
capable of gov’t support
 Rise of the commercial
(ISP)
– Similar organization and fees
to commercial telecoms
– Web access common as phones13

14. Early growth of the Internet and Web
14
Date Hosts
1
Domains
2
WebSites WHR(%)
3
1969 4
Jul 81 210
Jul 89 130,000 3,900 –
Jul 92
4
992,000 16,300 50 0.005
Jul 93 1,776,000 26,000 150 0.01
Jul 94
5
3,212,000 46,000 3,000 0.1
Jul 95 6,642,000 120,000 25,000 0.4
Jul 96 12,881,000 488,000 300,000 2.3
Jul 97 19,540,000 1,301,000 1,200,000 6.2
Jan 98 29,670,000 2,500,000 2,450.000 8.3
Jul 98 36,739,000 4,300,000 4,270,000 12.o
Jul 01 126,000,000 30,000,000 28,200,000 22.0
Gromov 2011
Experimental HTML
Launch public Web
 1A host is a domain name having an IP address record associated with it
 2A domain is a domain name that has name server (NS) records
associated with it and subdomains or hosts within the global domain.
 WebSites are specifically HTTP servers for HTML & other objects.
 3Web sites to Hosts Ratio – roughly estimates the percent of Web
surfing people that are trying to become the Web authors by creating
their own Web sites.

15. Phenomenal growth
 Some numbers (Witiger.Com)
– Number of Internet devices:
 1984  1,000 (one thousand)
 1992  1,000,000 (one million)
 2008  1,000,000,000 (one billion)
– To reach 50,000,000 (fifty million) users it took
the
 Telephone 38 years
 Television 13 years
 Internet 4 years
 iPod 3 years
 Facebook 2 years
15

16. How much knowledge held in the Web?
 My primary interest is meaningful “content” (web pages, documents,
books), not data
 Three Webs
– Surface web –freely accessible to a browser
 Inktomi Jan 2000 1,000,000,000 pages
 Notess (2006) Dec 2000 600,000,000
Dec 2001 1,500,000,000
Nov 2002 3,000,000,000
Feb 2004 4,000,000,000
2006 20,000,000,000
 Wikipedia current 36,607, 000 (~4 M for content)
 Google (2008) Jul 2008 1,000,000,000,000 (w/o duplicates)
 Indexed Web current ~47,000,000,000 (Google)
 Web Archive current 8,083,803 (books & texts)
– Deep/hidden Web – requires subscription or password to access, e.g.
 e-Journals: University of Melbourne Library accesses 116,279
– Some are available free to the web, most are not (Scholar indexes)
 e-Book titles on Amazon: 6,911,733; (437,674 are free, rest are not)
 Subscription news, financial reports, other databases, etc.
– Dark Web – encrypted & deeply hidden content (TOR, privacy, hacking, …)
 See Dr Gareth Owen 2015 Tor: Hidden Services and Deanonymisation
 Quantification difficult (~80% of access seems to be child abuse porn)
16

17. Some other uses of the Web/Internet
 Blogs (WordPress; Blogger)
 Cloud apps (Google Docs; Office 365)
 eCommerce (Kogan, eStore, Coles Online)
 Entertainment media (e.g., Netflix; Foxtel)
 Navigation & geolocation (e.g., Google Earth, Nearmap)
 News media (e.g., Google News, Huffington Post, CNN)
 Photography & Video (e.g., Flickr, Panoramio)
 Self storage (Dropbox, Google Drive)
 Sex/pornography
 Social networking (e.g., Facebook; Twitter ; Meetup; LinkedIn)
 Telephony & teleconferencing (Skype; Webex)
 Video sharing (YouTube, Vimeo)
17

18. Some thoughts on the
history, what it
means, and where it
is taking us

19. Why has the Web been so overwhelmingly successful
 Tony Smith (1995) “Why the Web” (before I knew it existed)
– modest extra layer on established & working technologies
– Developers worked in real world with open collaboration
– URL is human-readable and printable way to address any Internet
resource
– Climate for the Web established by a succession of grand visions
– Marc Andreessen built a user-friendly graphical interface
– Newbies rapidly found the Web effectively eliminated distribution
and publication costs for desk-top publishing
 Puts the evolutionary growth of knowledge into hyperdrive19
The World Wide Web links a vast network of … actors, human, non-human, material
and ethereal. The six above-listed causes of the Web’s success dance with those
actors across a profusion of interconnections. The ideas of human visionaries become
memes propagating an epidemic of Web ‘surfing’. The Web’s computer codes become
epidemic across the Internet. Loops in the Web’s links, and in its actor-network,
feed back positively and cybernetically—fuelling its continued near exponential
growth and its ever-accelerating transformation into cyberspace proper.
[Smith 1995]

20. Where is the Web likely to go in the future
 Trends
– Ubiquity is almost here now
– Increasing epistemic power
 Web applications are making more and more decisions on their own
before consulting their human users
 Able to make decisions with ever increasing information sources
– Generalization/convergence
 more and more functions incorporated in single applications
 e.g., Google Earth/Maps as a geolocated memory prosthesis
 Future
– Increasing replacement (not extension) of human cognitive functions
 E.g., spatial navigation
 E.g., memory and recall (life-logging?)
– Emergent functions
 Global brain?
– Burnout?
20

21. Next session
 Wrapping up the Web
– I’ve already covered concepts fro most of the book sections listed
below in earlier Meetup sessions
– Here I’ll say a bit more about how the technology carries out
cognitive processes in the Web
– I hope Tony will join me in a free-form discussion of Web history
and our experiences with it
– There is a lot more to be said about human interactions with the
technology and the Web, but that will be left until after an
Interlude where I take a much deeper look from physical and
evolutionary points of view at the emergence and interrelations of
life and knowledge
21
Episode 3(4) - Emerging cognition in the Web itself
Retrieving Value from the Web Semantically
Cataloging Approaches
Indexing Approaches
Using Portals
Multimedia
Wrapping Up the Web