Marked UCLA

SubjectIn outline · lessons being written

The internet and the web

A network linking four American universities in 1969 grew into the internet. In 1989 Tim Berners-Lee, at CERN, proposed the World Wide Web, and now billions of people are online.

Place
UCLA · CERN · CambridgeThe whole world
Laid out as
An inventionA new way of doing something, link by link: what came before, the breakthrough, and what it changed.
Lessons
6 planned, none written yet

The lessons we plan

Titles may change as they are written

  1. IARPANET
  2. IIPackets and protocols
  3. IIIThe web at CERN
  4. IVSearch
  5. VSocial media
  6. VIWho is still offline?

Still to come

The people and objects these lessons will cover

People

  • Vint Cerf
  • Bob Kahn
  • Tim Berners-Lee
  • Radia Perlman
  • Karen Spärck Jones

Objects

  • The first web server
  • The CERN proposal

Where it sits

All of human history, era by era

Early human ancestryOur species and the Old Stone AgeFarming and the New Stone AgeFirst cities and the Bronze AgeThe Iron Age and growing statesThe classical worldAfter the empiresMedieval networks and empiresOceans crossedRevolutions and the first factoriesIndustry, empire and world warThe world since 1945

1969 to now. Each era is drawn the same width, so the earliest are squeezed: era II alone is over 300,000 years.

Nearby in time and place

This page is an outline. The summary above is a starting point; each lesson, when it is written, will give its sources, its pictures and where historians disagree. Spotted a mistake?