The Origin of The Biggest Business and Social Change In Our Lifetimes By John F. McMullen



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The Origin of The Biggest Business and Social Change In Our Lifetimes

By John F. McMullen – www.johnmac13.com --- johnmac13@gmail.com
I’d like to draw your attention to what I consider the most important technological innovation in the last twenty-five years: The Graphic Browser for the World Wide Web.
It is hard to believe that the Graphic Browser has been around for less than twenty years and really did not come into common use until 1995-1996. In that short time, it has changed how we gather information, shop, pay bills, advertise, keep in touch with family and friends -- in short, most of the things we do.
As with most innovation, the graphic browser did not just fall out of the sky but was the confluence of years of thought with hardware and software development. Throughout the history of scientific progress, many innovators and science fiction writers have seen things as they "should be" or "will be" long before the technology was available to implement the vision. Perhaps the most famous is Leonardo DaVinci's drawings of submarines and "flying machines" long before the technology existed to make these visions viable.
The idea that later became the World Wide Web originated as World War II was winding down. Two great discoveries came out of World War II, the Atomic Bomb and the first working electronic digital computer, the ENIAC ("Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer") -- both developed under government funding, by the way.
The ENIAC development effort set the standard for future major computer systems development -- it was late and over budget -- but it was a landmark development that paved the way for all future computer development. While the reason for its development was the rapid calculation of gunnery trajectories, those involved realized that computers would have uses other that those related to the military. One of the developers, J. Presper Eckert, suposedly envisioned that twenty-five computers like this could satisfy all the business needs of the US through the end of the twentieth century (he underestimated a tad -- my iPhone4 has much more power than the ENIAC and I don't run many businesses with it).
A more prescient view was put forth by Vannevar Bush in a July 1945 article for the Atlantic Monthly, "As We May Think" (http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-may-think/3881/). Bush, former Dean of MIT School of Engineering and science advisor to FDR (from which position he oversaw both the development of the A-Bomb and ENIAC), saw computers as tools that would aid humans in research. While he had the equipment all wrong -- what was needed to make the system he envisioned work was decades away -- his idea of a computer that had access to and could retrieve all possible information that one might need became the basis for what we now know as the World Wide Web, Wikipedia, Google Search, etc.
Bush also pointed out that we think and want information in an "associative" manner which is different from the "linear" manner in which we read (start to finish, top to bottom). When reading an article or discussing a subject, our minds constantly jump -- ex. when reading the above, you might wish more information about Bush or WWII or FDR or the A-Bomb; in his vision, you could go off on a tangent, obtain the information, read it and come back to where you were -- or go deeper into other subjects -- Eleanor Roosevelt, Japan, Alan Turing or any other subject found as you burrowed further away from the original article.
Bush's theories were further refined by Theodor Holm "Ted" Nelson, who, in 1964 coined the term "HyperText" to refer to material that went "deep" rather than "long." So, for instance, if you wished more information about Alan Turing mentioned above, you could point at or "click" Turing's named and "go deeper" to get more information. The term hypertext was expanded to "HyperMedia" as audio, graphic, and video computer files came into being.
Nelson had begun work in 1960 on a system which he called Project Xanadu to bring his ideas to fruition (he documented his efforts and plans in his 1974 very interesting and unusual book "Computer Lib / Dream Machine” and, at the time of this writing, his work continues (http://xanadu.com/).
Another key player in this story is Alan Kay. A computer scientist and visionary, Kay is well-known for the phrase that he coined, "The best way to predict the future is to invent it;" more importantly for this narrative, he helped to invent it in two ways.
While at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center ("Xerox PARC"), Kay wrote an article in Byte Magazine in 1978, describing the "Dynabook", his vision of a computer the size of a yellow pad which students would carry around and, when information was needed, would obtain it from an invisible net in the sky -- and this was before there were laptops, tablets, or an accessible Internet.
Kay, also at Xerox PARC, was part of a team with Adele Goldberg, Larry Tessler, and others, that developed the first object-oriented program language, "SmallTalk", and then used it to develop the first Graphical User Interface ("GUI"). The GUI was used on Xerox's Alto and Star systems but really came to prominence when licensed by Apple Computer and used on Apple's Lisa and Macintosh computers (Apple later licensed the GUI to Microsoft).
Parallel to the GUI development was the search by British programmer and consultant Tim Berners-Lee for a system to better manage the great amount of information developed by visiting and resident scientists at the Particle Physical Laboratory in Zurich, Switzerland ("CERN"). Faced with a multitude of operating systems and word processing programs, Berners-Lee came up with a method of "tagging" information so that it might be found through a common text-based interface (actually, Berners-Lee's system used the "telnet" or "terminal" utility program found in all major operating systems to "take" users from one computer location to others). The system, which Berners-Lee called the "World Wide Web" ("the Web") was soon opened to users on the Internet who would telnet to "info.cern.ch" to access the gateway to information.
While the Web was very useful to scientists and educators, it required users to understand the arcane interface of the Internet, including the telnet utility, and was not something that appealed to the general public.
Parallel to the development of the Web was Microsoft's progress in its development of the GUI it called "Windows." Microsoft's early attempts in this area had been plain awful (due more to the limitations of its MS-DOS operating system and the poor displays available for "PC-compatible machines" than to poor design of the GUI interface). When Microsoft introduced Windows 3.0 and "ported over" GUI versions of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint from the Macintosh, it seemed to have finally gotten it right (it tuned out that Windows 3.0 "crashed" a lot but Microsoft took corrective action with the release of Windows 3.1.1).
There was, however, aversion to the adoption of GUIs by the "techie" types who managed corporate systems and technical support types. They felt that one could "do more" at the "command line" and that Windows "slowed down" machines -- and so the adoption was slow.
The slow adoption of both the Web and GUI interfaces changed dramatically when Marc Andreessen, a student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Eric Bina, a co-worker at the university's National Center for Supercomputing Applications ("NCSA") developed "Mosaic," a graphic "web browser" that allowed users to utilize the World Wide Web through a GUI interface. Once the computing world was exposed to Mosaic which only ran on systems with a GUI (Macintosh, Unix with an "X-Windows" interface," and MS-DOS systems running Windows 3.1.1), the demand to use GUI systems overwhelmed techie opposition and the large majority of computer users migrated to GUI interfaces.
Shortly after Andreessen graduated, he, Bina, and Jim Clark, ex-CEO of Silicon Graphics founded Netscape Communications (after some unpleasantness with the University when they tried to call the new firm "Mosaic Communications" because the university was about to license the browser to Spyglass, which would call it "Spyglass Mosaic" and later license it to Microsoft which would make it the basis for its "Internet Explorer" ("IE")).
Bob Metcalfe, an ex-PARCer who developed the Ethernet networking standard, writing in the August 21, 1995 issue of InfoWorld, described the early years of Web development thusly:
"In the Web's first generation, Tim Berners-Lee launched the Uniform Resource Locator (URL), Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), and HTML standards with prototype Unix-based servers and browsers. A few people noticed that the Web might be better than Gopher.
In the second generation, Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina developed NCSA Mosaic at the University of Illinois. Several million then suddenly noticed that the Web might be better than sex.
In the third generation, Andreessen and Bina left NCSA to found Netscape..."
Netscape's Navigator Browser eventually begat "Firefox" and it, Microsoft's IE, and Google's "Chrome" became the browsers that now dominate the market. Access to the Web became a major impetus for people to buy smartphones and tablets and, within twenty years, the Web came to dominate most lives -- it is estimated that, by the end of 2012, there will be 1,000,000,000,000 (1 trillion) members of Facebook, a system made possible by the existence of the Web.
Business took advantage of the Web by offering attractive and efficient systems for customers to pay bills; shop for merchandise on-line and order it; download books, music, movies & television shows; and research whatever interests them. Largely unnoticed is the fact that these "attractive and efficient systems" have made the customer part of the businesses' network and facilitated the loss of jobs of clerical, data entry, manufacturing, distribution, retail, real estate, travel agency, and many other industries personnel.
In the words of Billy Pilgrim, "... and so it goes."
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