Module 1 - Hardware & Protocols

SITE 1 - A Concise History of the Internet

Zakon, R H. Hobbes' Internet Timeline. Copyright (c)1993-2006 Retrieved from the internet on Monday April 23
http://www.zakon.org/robert/internet/timeline/

Hobbes Internet Timeline is a great site because it gives you an overview of where things have come from, when and how. To use the internet well, it is important to be aware of how things have developed. I have put this site here, because no matter which tool you are investigating, it provides leads to a huge amount of great history. For example: http://www.rand.org/pubs/research_memoranda/RM3420/
is an 'Introduction to Distributed Communications Networks' - and gives astounding detail about how and why the first such network was developed- in the atmosphere of cold war and threats of world wide nuclear obliteration.
This site relates to the concept 27 in Module 1 'The Persistence of History'. To really appreciate, and be able to possibly predict to some extent the next generation of developments, it is vital to have some understanding of how the first inklings came to be. Having this historical knowledge leaves us not so much at the mercy of rapid fire developments, but understanding how quickly things can move and why.

SITE 2 - all about URLs

W3 C Architecture domain. Revision: 1.58 of Date: @7 Feb 2006 Created 1993 by Tim Berner Lee. Retrieved April 24 2007 from the World Wide Web:

http://www.w3.org/Addressing/#background

This site contains a succinct and informative account of the history and development of URLs. It also contains a wealth of resources about this and other facets of the internet. It makes for fascinating reading as it has been put together by some of the earliest developers of the WWW. This could mean that the sources are all 'inhouse' and of course will support W3C's version of events. But, history told from their point of view still makes for critical reading if we are to really understand where it came from.
Again, this links with the Persistence of History concept as it allows us to understand how quickly it became complicated and why decisions were made.