The Integrated Computing Experience

The First-Wave Web.The early Internet, which lasted about 25 years, started with academic and government work. Computers and workstations were the dominant tools that people used in developing this technology. The telephone connections were all dial-up lines. Basically, computers were masquerading as people on the world's telephone network. Occasionally people would have leased lines and ethernets that they connected. The protocols were for simple applications. The earliest use of this consisted of just transferring files and moving packets around at the level of TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol). The applications were FTP and SMTP, which stood for, respectively, File Transfer Protocol and Simple Mail Transfer Protocol. This was the beginning of the Internet we know today.
The Second-Wave WebNext came what I call the "adolescent Internet." In this environment, HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) and HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) grew up to allow us to take browsers and implement what I call the "Web, Phase One." People were using computers to dial up and access the Internet. Here you had people reading Web pages. We get very excited about the Internet; it's already started to change everybody's life. But at the end of the day, the Internet you know today is just about people clicking their mouse on a link and reading a Web page. Now that has evolved to the "Web, Phase Two," where, with PERL (Practical Extraction and Report Language) scripts and hand-coded mechanisms, you have the ability to create some two-way interaction through those Web pages. This is the beginning of the ability to have this connectivity.