Websites are Awesome

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Websites Are Awesome
Logan Lenz
Copyright © 2021
ISBN:
Dedication
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Acknowledgment
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CONTENTS
Dedication 3
Acknowledgment 4
About the Author 6
Chapter 1 8
About the Author
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Page Blank Intentionally
Chapter 1
The History of Websites
“Your website is the window of your business. Keep it fresh, keep it exciting.”
– Jay Conrad Levisnon
According to Statista,
“As of January 2021, there were 4.66 billion active internet users worldwide - 59.5 percent of the global population.”
Whoa! More than half of the world population uses the internet now. Just two years ago, in 2019, the number of active internet users was 3.97 billion. That means that within just two years, almost one billion more people have started using the internet. With each passing day, this number is increasing, which equates to business competition, more sales, and more returns.
Anyone who uses the internet must have visited numerous websites for buying something or just finding the relevant information about some specific topic. It will not be an overstatement if I say that websites are the soul of the internet. As the title of this book suggests, this book is all about websites and how awesome they can be. Nevertheless, before diving into the detail of websites, let’s first briefly discuss the history of the internet. I promise I am not going to make it boring for you.
How the Internet Came into Being?
The history of the internet dates back to the 1950s when the Cold War had led to cause extreme tension between the two superpowers, North America and the Soviet Union. The fear of surprise nuclear attacks from both ends had taken a toll on people’s lives. This anxious situation made the US realize that an efficient communication system was needed that wouldn’t be affected by a Soviet nuclear attack.
It was a time when computers were not widely used because computer systems consisted of huge machines that were only accessible to military scientists and university researchers. However, since these machines were limited in number, to use the technology, the scientists and researchers had to cover long distances. As a result, the researchers came up with the idea of “time-sharing.” Through time-sharing, several users were able to use the same mainframe computer simultaneously through a chain of terminals. However, it caused a problem. Each user could only use a fraction of the computer’s total power, which affected the efficiency of the results. This difficulty of using such huge yet limited computer systems led the scientists and researchers to create a network of computers.
In 1965, Robert Lawrence, Chief scientist at ARPA (Advanced Research Project Agency), used a telephone line and an acoustic modem to connect two computers, each at a different place, by transferring digital data using packets. This network was further advanced in 1969 when the first packet switching network was produced. Leonard Kleinrock, an American scientist, was the first person to use the packet switching network to send a message from a computer at the University of California, Los Angeles, to a computer at Stanford. In this message, Kleinrock intended to type the word “login.” However, right after typing the first two letters, “L” and “O,” the system crashed.
The second attempt was successful, and several messages were exchanged. This was how ARPANET was born.
ARPANET continued to grow and the scientists and researchers began to feel that they needed a set of rules to control data packets. So, in 1974, An American electrical engineer, Bob Kahn along with Vint Cerf, introduced a new technique called transmission-control protocol, widely recognized as TCP/IP. This method allowed computers to speak the same language.
The invention of TCP/IP led ARPANET to rapidly become a worldwide interconnected network of networks or the “Internet.”
The First Website
The name behind the creation of the first website is Tim Berners-Lee. He was a British computer scientist. He created the first-ever website on the World Wide Web with the aim to distribute information to other researchers. This website was designed at the Swiss research center, CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research). Unlike today’s websites, the first website had no colors, images, or attractive interface. Instead, it consisted of plain text and a few hyperlinks only. Many of you might not have visited this website before. But I am sure you now want to have a look at that. So, here is the link for you.
​http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html​
Apart from developing the first website, Berners-Lee also created Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), with he used to code the CERN website. After the first website, the World Wide Web kept growing and after almost two years, the world’s first search engine came into being. It was called ALIWEB (Archie Like Indexing for the Web). ALIWEB was more like a webpage that arranged different categories of the links, such as computing, money, entertainment, newsstand, living, recreation, research, and shopping. Apart from an organized list of links, ALIWEB also used a yellow background to help its users easily identify what they were searching for. Just like the first website, you can also check the interface of ALIWEB using the following link,
​http://www.aliweb.com/​
The First Website Creation Tools
To be continued
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Dedication
Acknowledgment
About the Author
Chapter 1
The History of Websites