Wednesday, September 8, 2010

Movable Type of the 20th Century

The year is 1450.
Johannes Gutenberg revolutionized the world with his invention of the printing press. With this invention, literature, scriptures, and knowledge in general was made readily available to anyone and everyone.

From the Introduction of our reading:
"Printing not only preserved the great works of the past but opened minds to new ideas." (link)

In 1999, A&E Network ranked Gutenberg at the top of their "People of the Millenium." It is impossible to describe the impact this man and his invention.

The Man and the Beard!

How does this invention compare to the modern times? Funny you should ask....

Aww...No beard?
The year is 1969 (approx).
Larry Roberts revolutionized the world with his invention of the Internet. With this invention, literature, scriptures, and knowledge in general was made readily available to anyone and everyone. (See a trend?)

Larry didn't really invent the internet as we know it.
"During the Cold War, many more mainframes were brought online to accomplish more complex and sophisticated tasks. It became necessary to find a way to enable these mainframes to communicate with each other by means of a less cumbersome process than mailing magnetic tapes between computer centers. In response to this need, the Department of Defense's Advanced Research Project Agency (ARPA) began examing the feasibility of a redundant, networked communications system to support the military's exchange of information. Larry Roberts developed the project from its inception." (link)

So Larry created the Internet idea of having computers networked together. This ARPANET became more and more popular during the 70's and 80's. In the mid-80's Tim Berners-Lee invented what we consider the World Wide Web. Tim was the inventor of HTML (Hyper-Text Markup Language). Basically, the ability to associate a word, link, or picture with another website, essentially linking everything together in a big web.

So there you have it! A short short history of the internet (no, it wasn't invented by Al Gore!) The printing press made information much more available several hundred years ago, and the Internet makes EVERYTHING available now.

1 comment:

  1. I enjoyed your short blog on the origins of the internet. I thought about researching this a little myself, but it is great that I could just take advantage of your research through your blog. There definitely is a parallel between the invention of the printing press and the internet. Exciting that the development of the internet is so recent and that many of us have lived in the period of its development and dissemination.

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