主题：【文摘】“完整的”INTERNET 历史 1) -- 仙八

The 'Complete' History of the Internet

Maybe not the complete history but a valid attempt. This is a history of the Internet from the

perspective of a computer geek who likes knowing more than what the instructions tell us.

This will not be a complete list but a work in progress. Enjoy.

1600s - 1800s

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

[1642] Blaise Pascal was a French mathematician, physicist, and religious philosopher. His contributions to the natural sciences include the construction of mechanical calculators. Pascal developed a mechanism to calculate with 8 figures and carrying of 10's, 100's, and 1000's etc. The machine is called the Pascaline. In honor to his scientific contributions, the name Pascal has been given to a programming language, as well as to many mathematical concepts.

[1791] Charles Babbage is born in Totnes, Devonshire UK. Babbage is known to some as the "Father of Computing" and the inventor of the first universal digital computer for his contributions to the basic design of the computer through his Analytical machine. The use of Jacquard punch cards, of chains and subassemblies, and ultimately the logical structure of the modern computer - all come from Babbage.

[1858] Cyrus West Field was an American businessman who was chiefly responsible for laying the first submarine telegraph cable between America and Europe. In 1854 Field proposed the construction of a 2,000-mile-long underwater telegraph line between Newfoundland and Ireland. In 1858 Field successfully established telegraphic communication between the two, but the line went dead after a month. A commercially viable cable was finally laid in 1866.

[1876 Mar 7] Two inventors Elisha Gray and Alexander Graham Bell both independently designed devices that could transmit speech electrically (the telephone). Both men rushed their respective designs to the patent office within hours of each other, Alexander Graham Bell patented his telephone first.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

1940s - 1960s

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

[1945 Sep 9] The first "Computer Bug" is found. A moth is found trapped between points at Relay # 70, Panel F, of the Mark II Aiken Relay Calculator while it is being tested at Harvard University. The operators affixed the moth to the computer log, with the entry: "First actual case of bug being found". They put out the word that they had "debugged" the machine, thus introducing the term "debugging a computer program".

[1947 Dec 23] The first transistor is placed on display, consisting of a crude looking collection of wires, insulators, and germanium, at Bell Labs by William Shockley and his research team of John Bardeen and Walter Brattain.

[1952] Grace Murray Hopper (1906-1992), American Navy officer, mathematician, and pioneer in data processing, born in New York City and educated at Vassar College and at Yale University. Hopper was credited with devising the first compiler (1952), a program that translates instructions for a computer from English to machine language. She helped develop the Flow-Matic programming language (1957) and the Common Business-Oriented Language (COBOL; 1959-61) for the UNIVAC 1, the first commercial electronic computer. Grace was also named a rear admiral, the first female rear admiral in the U.S. Navy.

[1958] The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) was established as the first U.S. response to the Soviet Union launching of Sputnik.

[1960 Nov] Telephone calls are switched for the first time by computer.

[1963] Dartmouth College located in Hanover, New Hampshire incorporates the introduction to the use of computers as a regular part of the Liberal Arts Program.

[1963] American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII) is created by Robert Bemer, permitting machines from different manufacturers to exchange data. ASCII consists of 128 unique strings of ones and zeros.

[1963] The computer mouse is invented by Douglas Engelbart of Stanford Research Institute. The first mouse was bulky, and used two gear wheels perpendicular to each other: the rotation of each wheel was translated into motion along one axis in the plane.

[1964] There are approximately 18,200 computer systems in the United States. Over 70% of those computers were manufactured by International Business Machines (IBM).

[1964] Thomas Kurtz and John Kemeny created Beginner's All-Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code (BASIC), an easy-to-learn programming language for their students at Dartmouth College.

[1967] The Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) work with U.S. computer experts to form a network of Interface Message Processors (IMPS). The computers would act as gateways to mainframes at a variety of institutions in the United States and provide a major part of what would become the Internet in the years ahead.

[1968] Intel is founded by Robert Noyce, Gordon Moore and Andy Grove. They decided to call their company INTegrated ELectronics or "Intel" for short. Intel is a U.S. based multinational corporation that is best known for designing and manufacturing microprocessors and specialized integrated circuits.

[1969] The Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) originates the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (Arpanet), a service designed to provide efficient ways to communicate for scientists. A Cambridge, Massachusetts consulting firm, Bolt Beranek and Newman, who won a ARPA contract to design and build a network of Interface Message Processors (IMPS) the year prior, ships (Sept.) the first unit to UCLA and ships (Oct.) the second unit to Stanford Research Institute. IMPS act as gateways to mainframes at a variety of institutions in the United States. Within a few days of delivery, the machines at UCLA and Stanford link up for the first time and Arpanet is founded. Later the network expands to four nodes. The first four nodes (networks) consisted of the University of California Los Angeles, University of California Santa Barbara, University of Utah and the Stanford Research Institute. This system would evolve to be known as the Internet or the Information Super Highway.

[1969] CompuServe time-sharing service is founded. Later CompuServe becomes the first online service to offer electronic mail capabilities and technical support to personal computer users.

[1969] Intel makes the announcement of a much larger Random Access Memory (RAM) chip, which boasts of a 1KB capacity.

[1969] Bell Labs (AT&T) drops out of the MULTICS (Multiplexed Information and Computing Service) project. A system which was supposed to support 1000 online users can barely handle three. Out of the ashes grows the most influential operating system in history, UNIX. Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie and others start working on UNIX at Bell Labs. UNIX is a portable, multi-task and multi-user computer operating system designed with the goal of allowing several users to access the computer simultaneously. Ken Thompson writes the first version of UNICS for the PDP-7 (Programmed Data Processor) in one month while his wife is on vacation. He allocates one week each to the operating system functions: the kernel, the shell, the editor, and the assembler. He does this on a machine with 4K of 18 bit words. UNICS is a pun on MULTICS and stands for Uniplexed Information and Computing Services. The name is changed to UNIX which is not an acronym. This version of UNIX is in assembly language.

[1969] The first computer hackers emerge at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). They borrow their name from a term to describe members of a model train group at the school who "hack" the electric trains, tracks and switches to make them perform faster and differently. A few of the members transfer their curiosity and rigging skills to the new mainframe computing systems being studied and developed on campus.

[1969] Joe Engressia (The Whistler, Joybubbles and High Rise Joe), while a mathematics student at University of South Florida (USF) in the late 1960s, discovers that he could whistle into a pay telephone the precise pitch --the 2600-cycle note, close to a high A-- which would trip phone circuits and allow him to make long-distance calls at no cost. Joe, who is blind, will later become known as the father of phreaking. Phreaking is a slang term for the action of making a telephone system do something that it normally should not allow.

[1969 May 1] Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) is founded by W.J. "Jerry" Sanders and seven friends. AMD is a manufacturer of integrated circuits. Later the company would become the second-largest supplier of x86 compatible processors.

[1969 Dec 28] Linus Benedict Torvalds is born in Helsinki, Finland. Linus would later, in 1991, start the development of the free computer operating system called Linux.