This blogosphere is new to me. It seems to be the wave of the future, and the future is now. People are able to publish their thought and ideas via the miracle of the internet.
The concept of WANs began circa 1958. Under the management of the ARPANET, former President Eisenhower initiated this advanced research in reaction to Sputnik’s successful launch and orbit in 1958. ARPANET, now called DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency). Sorry Al.
During the same period, from an unexpected arena, an English professor named Marshall McLuhan (whom some consider the father of the electronic age), coined the term “the medium is the message.” In addition, he first popularized the notion of a global village (another of his intuitive expressions), and rightfully deserves credit for his vision. In Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, he wrote:
If the work of the city is the remaking or translating of man into a more suitable form than his nomadic ancestors achieved, then might not our current translation of our entire lives into the spiritual form of information seem to make of the entire globe, and of the human family, a single consciousness (61).
The internet seems to be moving us towards that single consciousness. Doesn’t it?
Another important name in Internet history is Vannevar Bush, a graduate of MIT’s engineering school, president of the Carnegie Institution, and inventor. Although Bush did not invent HyperTextMarkupLanguage (HTML), in 1945 his theoretical machine (memex) created a foundation for Tim Berners-Lee to invent the next internet evolution, the World Wide Web. Berners-Lee was the son of mathematicians and a consultant to Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucleaire, commonly known as CERN. HTML enabled the use of Uniform Resource Locator (URL), as website addresses. Creating a union of the various internet technologies, using the aforementioned XML, SOAP, UDDI, and WSDL, and adding Douglas Engelbart’s inventions of the mouse and graphical user interface (GUI), you have the functioning World Wide Web, as we know it today. It’s a wonderful thing.
3 comments:
This is the stuff science fiction is made of.
JW
thank you, friend
this, by the way, was an interesting read :]
Thanks for your comment on my blog. I'm curious...have you read "Amusing Ourselves to Death" by Neil Postman? He has a lot to say about how TV changed modern culture. It includes a discussion about McLuhan's "the medium is the message" and in fact builds much of its argument on that belief.
It's been a long time since I read it, but I found it very interesting. I think you probably would too. Congrats on starting your blog.
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