What drove the popularity of the Internet wasn't the raw ability to transfer data across the globe, but the new applications that used that ability. In technology, it's always the software that drives the hardware. Customers wouldn't buy a DVD player if some of their favorite movies weren't available on DVD. What is always needed with a new technology is a killer app, an application that convinces people to buy the technology.
When the Internet was still a cottage industry, it lacked a killer app. E-mail was useful, but not enough people had e-mail accounts to make it exciting. What the Internet needed was an application that would allow users to publish documents and other files so that anyone who needed them could find them and access them. Then the Internet could become a giant repository of information.
One of the first steps in this direction was FTP, or File Transfer Protocol, which, as the name implies, is a mechanism for transferring files across the Internet. FTP allowed users to publish files on a particular computer and allowed others to copy these files to their own computers. Files could be made available to all or could be protected by a password.
However, to access an FTP file, users would have to know the address of the computer where it resided. Just as with RAM, where every byte of memory has an address, each computer on the Internet has an address. If users aren't given the address where a particular file is located, they can't find the file. The situation would be akin to a library whose books are ordered on the shelves by ISBN instead of by subject and author. No one would be able find anything that way without using the library's catalog.
The next step, then, was creating a catalog for the FTP files. In 1989, McGill University in Montreal developed a tool called "Archie," the name a play on the words "archive" and "archivist." This tool would regularly contact all the FTP file locations it knew about, request their file directories, and compose the file list into a searchable index. Thus, Archie can be considered the first Internet search engine.
The tool did not solve all the problems. It could only search FTP addresses it had been given; it could not find new FTP locations on its own. Also, Archie wasn't easy for nontechnical people to use. In addition, the program was developed for UNIX systems, and like most UNIX programs of that era, depended upon a certain level of user savvy.
Another problem is that although Archie allowed searching for files, it did not allow browsing. To continue the library analogy, searching with Archie is like using the card catalog to find titles on a specific subject, and browsing is like wandering the stacks to see if any of the titles on the spines sound interesting. Also, libraries often make displays - like "Fun Books about the Olympics!" - but there's no equivalent way to group titles using FTP and Archie. In short, no real system of organization existed among the FTP files.
Then, in 1991, the Gopher system was introduced, so named because it was developed at the University of Minnesota, whose mascot is a golden gopher. Instead of allowing users to simply publish files, Gopher was a mechanism for publishing both files and menus on the Internet. Rather than being presented with a list of files, the user accessing a Gopher site was given a menu with options like: "1. Files on Prussian Military History." Menus could have submenus, and submenus could have further menus below them, and so on.
Thus, Gopher was easily used by nontechnical people and allowed easy browsing. This system also allowed one Gopher site to reference another. Users who published a list of Prussian military history files could include menu items that would take them to other Gopher sites that had files on the same subject.
As with FTP, search engines were developed for Gopher, the first being called "Veronica." Officially, this was an acronym for "Very Easy Rodent Oriented Netwide Index of Computerized Archives," but the name, clearly inspired by the FTP search engine Archie, was a play on the character Veronica from the Archie comic.
Because Gopher sites referenced each other, it allowed search engines to find new Gopher locations on their own. A spider is a program that "crawls" through references on Internet sites (like those in Gophers) to find new sites and material. Through the use of spiders, search engines could eventually index all the Gophers in existence.
All the pieces were falling into place, but the Internet still lacked its killer app. Though Gopher was easier to use than FTP, it was still far from the mouse-based graphical interfaces that users enjoyed on the Macintosh and in Windows.
While Gopher was being developed, a physics researcher, Tim Berners-Lee, led a team that suggested organizing documents using hypertext. A hypertext document contains embedded links to other documents. This is similar to the Gopher concept except that the documents and references to other documents are integrated, not separated into menus and files. Note that at this stage, the documents were all plain text, and the links between documents were chosen using the keyboard, not the mouse.
The final piece came into place with Mosaic in 1993, which was a hypertext program that displayed documents graphically and in which users selected links to other documents with the mouse. Soon everyone was creating hypertext documents and linking them to each other. The links among these documents formed a kind of spiderweb, and the entire collection of interrelated hypertext documents is now called the World Wide Web, or WWW, often just called "the Web."
The Web was the Internet's killer app. While the Internet had long been the playground of researchers, college students, and hard-core computer enthusiasts, it now had a purpose that was so powerful and easy to use that the public couldn't help but notice. The popularity of the Web caused an explosive growth in the Internet. The number of connected computers seemed to double overnight. Even today, to many people, "the Internet" and "the Web" are the same thing, because to them there's no point to the Internet without the Web.
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