Graphics Programs Reference
In-Depth Information
both binary and text files. FTP has remained the
most common means of file transfer, and may in
some cases, be faster than those developed later
on. While most web browsers support file trans-
fer via FTP, you can, if you know where to find
a file, have it emailed back to you (Krol, 1994;
Shirky, 1994). The prime search adjunct for FTP
is ARCHIE, developed in 1990-1991 by Alan
Emtage, Peter Deutsch and Bill Heelan from the
McGill University Computing Center, Canada.
Some commentators view ARCHIE as the very
first search engine. Its' name is drawn from the
term 'archive', and not necessarily as a paean to
the comic book character. Originally, there were
separate ARCHIE servers in many locations
however, few if any survive today.
In 1989, the part of the internet most familiar
to most of us came into being. The underlying
principles had been around for quite some time,
but it took the leadership of Tim Berners-Lee, a
physicist at CERN, the European Particle Phys-
ics Lab in Switzerland, to create what we call
the World Wide Web. Data and information is
transferred via HyperText Transfer Protocol
(HTTP), which made its debut on the internet
in 1990. At first, it was intended as a way for
scientists to transmit information in a less linear
approach than offered by GOPHER. Berners-Lee
now heads the W3C consortium, which controls
and approves all RFCs for the web. In 1992 the
Internet Society was chartered with Vinton Cerf
as its head (Engst, 1994).
An early, but not the first, iteration of hypertext
was released with the Apple Computer operating
system. This was an object-oriented, graphical-
interfaced, searchable database application that
employed a simple programming language,
and could 'understand' and execute 'scripts' or
commands that were very much like the English
Language. Apple provided minimal support for the
application, and many users eventually shifted to
other applications. One of the fundamental weak-
nesses of Hypercard was that it was limited in
scope to access files and data only on the local hard
drive. Hypercard applications represented early
attempts in an educational sense, used primarily to
teach simple tasks. Since the web can be used to
access information from any connected computer,
it rapidly supplanted Hypercard application use.
The concept behind Hypercard and other
similar applications is that a user can click on
a 'link' and be taken to another card, or screen,
that is populated with different data based upon
the programming. Technically, GOPHER was a
hypertext application, but was somewhat rigid in
terms of interconnected links. Hypertext was ideal
for certain types of games and even instruction as
well as certain forms of research. With the advent
of LYNX, a full-duplex text-based hypertext appli-
cation that ran primarily under UNIX, information
became more widely available. One would type in
an arcane 'address' to access a remote 'site', and
the server would return a 'page', that might have
certain words highlighted in bold. These indicated
that upon selection, the user would be taken else-
where. LYNX navigation was via exclusive use
of the TAB and 'backTAB' keys, or by the four
directional arrows on the keyboard, much like all
other Command Line Interfaces (CLIs).
During late 1992, the National Center for Su-
percomputing Applications (NCSA) located at the
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign began
developing what is generally considered to be the
first Graphical User Interface (GUI) 'browser' for
hypertext viewing (Barksdale, Rutter and Teeter,
2002). MOSAIC was released in 1993, and was
able to display inline images, rather than relying
on a separate window. MOSAIC paved the way
for browsers with more familiar names such as
Microsoft Internet Explorer, Netscape Navigator,
and Mozilla Firefox. Although there are numerous
internet browsers available for different platforms,
they essentially deliver the same type of experi-
ence to the user.
WAIS or Wide Area Information Servers were
first conceived in big business, as opposed to
the educational and scientific domains. In 1991,
Apple Computer, Dow Jones & Co., Thinking
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