Weaving the World Wide Web - The Computing Universe: A Journey through a Revolution - page 229

encryption, all the elements were in place for e-commerce, or online retailing
(a.k.a. dot-com), to take off.
To understand the significance of the term dot-com , we need to understand
the naming convention that determines domain names on the Internet. Domain
names were introduced in the early days of the ARPANET to serve as easily
remembered names for ARPANET resources. The easily remembered domain
names corresponded to an unmemorable string of numbers that was the actual
Internet Protocol (IP) address. IP is the method by which data is sent from one
computer to another on the Internet, and an IP address is a sequence of num-
bers that specifies a particular computer on the network.
At first, the mapping of computer host names to numerical addresses
was held on a computer in Doug Engelbart's group at the Stanford Research
Institute. In 1983, the Internet Engineering Task Force, a group that devel-
ops and promotes Internet standards, introduced the Domain Name System,
which automatically translates the names we type in our web browser into IP
addresses. Today, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers
(ICANN) manages the assignment of top-level domain names ( Fig. 11.15 ). A
domain name consists of two or more labels, separated by dots, such as micro-
soft.com . The label after the first dot is the top-level domain, in this case, . com ,
signifying a commercial organization.
When the system was devised in the 1980s, there were two main groups of
domains - a top-level country domain consisting of a two-letter abbreviation,
such as .uk for the United Kingdom, and a top-level domain in the United States
for seven types of organizations, such as .com for businesses. The other six were
.gov for government, .edu for education, .mil for military, .org for organizations,
.net for network, and .int for international. After the top-level domain comes
the second-level domain and so on, as in southampton.ac.uk , where the second-
level domain name .ac (equivalent to .edu in the United States) represents an
academic organization in the United Kingdom, in this case the University of
Southampton. In the domain name www.cern.ch , www signifies the web server
at the CERN laboratory in Switzerland, which is specified by the .ch top-level,
country domain name.

Fig. 11.12. Plaque commemorating the
creation of the Mosaic web browser
at NCSA at the University of Illinois,
Urbana-Champaign.

Fig. 11.13. There was rapidly growing
interest in the web in the early days
from 1992 to 1994. This figure shows
the exponentially increasing load on
the CERN web server (note the vertical
scale).

Logs per week day
Logs during week-end

100000

10000

1000

100

10

1

Jul Oct Jan 92 Apr Jul Oct Jan 93 Apr Jul ct Jan 94 Apr