Internet, it happens, changes our lives
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The history of the Internet began with the development of electronic computers in the 1950s. This began with point-to-point communication between mainframe computers and terminals, expanded to point-to-point connections between computers and then early research into packet switching. Packet switched networks such as ARPANET, Mark I at NPL in the UK, CYCLADES, Merit Network, Tymnet, and Telenet, were developed in the late 1960s and early 1970s using a variety of protocols. The ARPANET in particular led to the development of protocols for internetworking, where multiple separate networks could be joined together into a network of networks.
In 1982 the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) was standardized and the concept of a world-wide network of fully interconnected TCP/IP networks called the Internet was introduced. Access to the ARPANET was expanded in 1981 when the National Science Foundation (NSF) developed the Computer Science Network (CSNET) and again in 1986 when NSFNET provided access to supercomputer sites in the United States from research and education organizations. Commercial Internet service providers (ISPs) began to emerge in the late 1980s and 1990s. The ARPANET was decommissioned in 1990. The Internet was commercialized in 1995 when NSFNET was decommissioned, removing the last restrictions on the use of the Internet to carry commercial traffic.
Since the mid-1990s the Internet has had a drastic impact on culture and commerce, including the rise of near-instant communication by electronic mail, instant messaging, Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) "phone calls", two-way interactive video calls, and the World Wide Web with its discussion forums, blogs, social networking, and online shopping sites. The research and education community continues to develop and use advanced networks such as NSF's very high speed Backbone Network Service (vBNS), Internet2, and National LambdaRail. Increasing amounts of data are transmitted at higher and higher speeds over fiber optic networks operating at 1-Gbit/s, 10-Gbit/s, or more. The Internet continues to grow, driven by ever greater amounts of online information and knowledge, commerce, entertainment and social networking.
In 1982 the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) was standardized and the concept of a world-wide network of fully interconnected TCP/IP networks called the Internet was introduced. Access to the ARPANET was expanded in 1981 when the National Science Foundation (NSF) developed the Computer Science Network (CSNET) and again in 1986 when NSFNET provided access to supercomputer sites in the United States from research and education organizations. Commercial Internet service providers (ISPs) began to emerge in the late 1980s and 1990s. The ARPANET was decommissioned in 1990. The Internet was commercialized in 1995 when NSFNET was decommissioned, removing the last restrictions on the use of the Internet to carry commercial traffic.
Since the mid-1990s the Internet has had a drastic impact on culture and commerce, including the rise of near-instant communication by electronic mail, instant messaging, Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) "phone calls", two-way interactive video calls, and the World Wide Web with its discussion forums, blogs, social networking, and online shopping sites. The research and education community continues to develop and use advanced networks such as NSF's very high speed Backbone Network Service (vBNS), Internet2, and National LambdaRail. Increasing amounts of data are transmitted at higher and higher speeds over fiber optic networks operating at 1-Gbit/s, 10-Gbit/s, or more. The Internet continues to grow, driven by ever greater amounts of online information and knowledge, commerce, entertainment and social networking.
Below is a video link of evolutionary history of the internet
The gate to future - evolutionary history of the internet and websites design
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Now, people have been retrieving information from websites for more than 20 years; generally, this is not a long period in human’s history of evolution, but I personally think it is one of the most important 20-year spans. In this period, websites have changed a lot; meanwhile, they have changed computer users in another way which is more than our imagination. I think it has totally changed people’s life styles. Nowadays we shop at home, we chat with families on the way to school, and we make money from colorful websites. Since websites have brought us such benefits, we should really thank this amazing era.
As a type of information carrier, websites were designed as the platform of communication and research. However, with the rapid development of the economy and technology, now the old designs have been given a modern color. We’ll have a difficult time finding a book that was created on a printing press, just like we’ll probably have a hard time finding a single column, text based website done entirely in HTML. But the difference between them is that, while the printing press evolved into the digital printer over a period of more than 500 years, web design has evolved to incredible heights in only about 20. What factors played a role in such a rapid transformation in the world of web design? How has web design evolved over the past two decades?
In late 1980s, the websites were text based sites, and that means we did not even have pictures online at that time until 1993, when a browser called Mosaic came out, which changed our lives forever. Speaking of the browser, it was the first web browser to allow pictures to appear in line with text, rather than being opened in a separate tab. It is not impressive with today’s point of view, but it was a revolution at that time, while the idea of clear Internet coverage is about as essential of a utility as water today, people would have had to wait several minutes for a single picture to load in 1991, let alone a streaming YouTube video. By around 1995, the practice of adding images to a website was nearly compulsory, but they were nowhere near as user friendly as they are today. Instead, most designers were forced to chop pictures up into smaller sections before organizing them in a table, similar to how we would put together a very simple puzzle. So we can see that even websites that were invented in the early 1990s have evolved a lot by the end of the century.
Around the year 2000, cascading style sheets (a style sheet language used to describe the presentation semantics of a document written in a markup language) began to gain popularity among web designers. Cascading style sheets allowed designers to create graphics separately from content. This is what made Cascading style sheets so important. Before cascading style sheets, coders would need to individually write the code for every page – even if the pages used a similar design. Cascading style sheets allowed designers to define some of the important and stoic elements of a web page, such as text size, font, background color, etc. So the websites were more friendly and colorful at that time, but a growing number of advertisements came to users as well. Nobody would know that websites had grown up in an incredible speed; Meanwhile, a large number of new words which related to websites had mushroomed, such as e-shopping, e-bank, and e-book etc. and they became more and more popular in the next century.
Time goes on, now we are using the 4th generation of websites, which is a faster, better and more beautiful generation. Nowadays, people cannot live without various websites, such as e-shopping, which was still a concept 20 years ago, but it is getting more and more popular right now, people no longer need to go out and stand in a queue for hours in the shopping centers, because now we can scan a small code at home, then the shopping centers such as Wal-Mart will deliver the items to our home. This is a true portrayal of our modern lives, as everything is becoming simple and fast. The evolution of websites did not only bring us the enjoyment in the sensory and visual, but also a qualitative leap of our lifestyles and saving a lot of time for us. All of these changes only took about 20 years. What an amazing digital world. In the new era of the 21st century, websites design tends to be more friendly and easier to use for normal users, dozens of words have gone, instead, a growing number of pictures and animations appeared on websites more frequently. Users do not have to be computer experts anymore to surf websites. Web sites come into our lives from an early age and become natural to work with, unlike old websites.
Now, the next generation of website is still under development, but what we can tell is that the next generation of websites will have a vastly different way of communicating information to their visitors. Websites will evolve into true communication platforms that will take advantage of the Web's multimedia capabilities and the Internet's broadband penetration. The new website model will have the look, feel, and sound of our very own narrow-cast communication channel complete with audio and video programming and on-site personalities that will present and guide audiences through the maze of content.
Rapid development of the technology has brought us benefits. Nobody knows what is going to happen tomorrow, because our lives are changing everyday by different things and different people, just as the history of evolution of website design. They are improving every day, but no one could tell exactly where it is heading to, and where it is going to stop, but one thing is for sure, as they become better and faster, so do our lives. Nowadays different kinds of websites have already become a unique part of people’s lives. Many people need websites, some of them cannot even live without websites and that is a reason to push the scientists to develop faster and better websites, and to serve us better.
History of the World Wide Web in 80s
1980While consulting for CERN June-December of 1980, Tim Berners-Lee writes a notebook program, "Enquire-Within-Upon-Everything", which allows links to be made between arbitrary nodes. Each node had a title, a type, and a list of bidirectional typed links. "ENQUIRE" ran on Norsk Data machines under SINTRAN-III. See: Enquire user manual as scanned images or as HTML page.
1989March"Information Management: A Proposal" written by Tim BL and circulated for comments at CERN (TBL). Paper "HyperText and CERN" produced as background (text or WriteNow format). 1990 MaySame proposal recirculatedSeptemberMike Sendall, Tim's boss, Oks the purchase of a NeXT cube, and allows Tim to go ahead and write a global hypertext system.OctoberTim starts work on a hypertext GUI browser+editor using the NeXTStep development environment. He makes up "WorldWideWeb" as a name for the program. (See the first browser screenshot) "World Wide Web" as a name for the project (over Information Mesh, Mine of Information, and Information Mine).Project original proposal reformulated with encouragement from CN and ECP divisional management. Robert Cailliau (ECP) joins and is co-author of new version.NovemberInitial WorldWideWeb program development continues on the NeXT (TBL) . This was a "what you see is what you get" (wysiwyg) browser/editor with direct inline creation of links. The first web server was nxoc01.cern.ch, later called info.cern.ch, and the first web page http://nxoc01.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html Unfortunately CERN no longer supports the historical site. Note from this era too, the least recently modified web page we know of, last changed Tue, 13 Nov 1990 15:17:00 GMT (though the URI changed.)NovemberTechnical Student Nicola Pellow (CN) joins and starts work on the line-mode browser. Bernd Pollermann (CN) helps get interface to CERNVM "FIND" index running. TBL gives a colloquium on hypertext in general.ChristmasLine mode browser and WorldWideWeb browser/editor demonstrable. Acces is possible to hypertext files, CERNVM "FIND", and Internet news articles.
1989March"Information Management: A Proposal" written by Tim BL and circulated for comments at CERN (TBL). Paper "HyperText and CERN" produced as background (text or WriteNow format). 1990 MaySame proposal recirculatedSeptemberMike Sendall, Tim's boss, Oks the purchase of a NeXT cube, and allows Tim to go ahead and write a global hypertext system.OctoberTim starts work on a hypertext GUI browser+editor using the NeXTStep development environment. He makes up "WorldWideWeb" as a name for the program. (See the first browser screenshot) "World Wide Web" as a name for the project (over Information Mesh, Mine of Information, and Information Mine).Project original proposal reformulated with encouragement from CN and ECP divisional management. Robert Cailliau (ECP) joins and is co-author of new version.NovemberInitial WorldWideWeb program development continues on the NeXT (TBL) . This was a "what you see is what you get" (wysiwyg) browser/editor with direct inline creation of links. The first web server was nxoc01.cern.ch, later called info.cern.ch, and the first web page http://nxoc01.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html Unfortunately CERN no longer supports the historical site. Note from this era too, the least recently modified web page we know of, last changed Tue, 13 Nov 1990 15:17:00 GMT (though the URI changed.)NovemberTechnical Student Nicola Pellow (CN) joins and starts work on the line-mode browser. Bernd Pollermann (CN) helps get interface to CERNVM "FIND" index running. TBL gives a colloquium on hypertext in general.ChristmasLine mode browser and WorldWideWeb browser/editor demonstrable. Acces is possible to hypertext files, CERNVM "FIND", and Internet news articles.
Efficiency of Online vs. Offline Learning: A Comparison of Inputs and Outcomes
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Abstract:
As the trend toward online education intensifies, questions remain regarding the overall efficiency of online courses versus their in-class counterparts. The current paper seeks to estimate the efficiency of students who take online courses relative to the efficiency of students who are enrolled in offline courses. Efficiency outcomes are defined in terms of (1) quantitative scores achieved by the student at the end of the course
(2) the student’s viewpoint of how much they learned in the course and
(3) the student’s level of satisfaction with the course.The authors use Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) to estimate a model of student efficiency. Demographics, student experience and student preferences are examined as differentiating attributes. The sample is taken from a course offered both online and in a traditional classroom setting, with both formats being taught by the same instructor in a single semester.Implications include a better understanding of the strengths and weaknesses in efficiency of different course formats.
As the trend toward online education intensifies, questions remain regarding the overall efficiency of online courses versus their in-class counterparts. The current paper seeks to estimate the efficiency of students who take online courses relative to the efficiency of students who are enrolled in offline courses. Efficiency outcomes are defined in terms of (1) quantitative scores achieved by the student at the end of the course
(2) the student’s viewpoint of how much they learned in the course and
(3) the student’s level of satisfaction with the course.The authors use Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) to estimate a model of student efficiency. Demographics, student experience and student preferences are examined as differentiating attributes. The sample is taken from a course offered both online and in a traditional classroom setting, with both formats being taught by the same instructor in a single semester.Implications include a better understanding of the strengths and weaknesses in efficiency of different course formats.
Source:Shweta Singh, David H. Rylander, Tina C. Mims "Efficiency of Online vs. Offline Learning: A Comparison of Inputs and Outcomes",
January 2012, <International Journal of Business, Humanities and Technology>
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Internet
http://walthowe.com/navnet/history.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Internet_map_1024.jpg
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9hIQjrMHTv4
January 2012, <International Journal of Business, Humanities and Technology>
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Internet
http://walthowe.com/navnet/history.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Internet_map_1024.jpg
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9hIQjrMHTv4