Come November, the focus shifts to the internet ─ the great significance this month has in the history of the World Wide Web. It was in November 1990 the British-born Tim Berners Lee submitted the final project proposal entitled WorldWideWeb: Proposal for the HyperText Project to CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, which led to the discovery of World Wide Web or simply Web, the way of accessing information over the medium of internet. The Web uses hyper text transfer protocol (HTTP) to transmit data and services over the internet. In this backdrop, I would like to share here my first experience with the internet and the World Wide Web. Although I worked with computers since 1988, starting with the fourth generation IBM XT 286 computers during my post graduation till the most modern ones today, my real sojourn with internet began sometime in mid 1995. It was in 1995 when I was doing my Ph. D. at a university in India. Those were the days; the internet was just beginning to take shape in the select few universities and academic institutions in India. Being a top-rated university in India, University of Hyderabad has been chosen to host one of the regional hubs for internet access, a privilege very few centers of excellence enjoyed at that time. I still vividly remember how I used to type simple text commands on a UNIX-based Sun Microsystems computer to browse the internet only to see a lengthy text in return at snail’s pace because of the prevailing low bandwidth at that time and also the images/graphics were not prevalent as they are today. Lot of browsing went with texting instead. It was an amazing experience indeed! Later on, I started to communicate through email, which came into being in late 1995. Since, we, students did not have the email facility at that time as it was just evolving; I used my mentor’s address initially to communicate with my peers in the field to exchange ideas and/or research data during my thesis phase from both within and outside the country. I don’t exactly remember what my first email communication on the internet was, but vaguely, it was something to do with a business mail, a symposium-related one that I was replying to the organizing committee thanking them for accepting my presentation at the conference organized by the Indian Academy of Sciences in Bangalore, India. In that sense, I didn’t have much privacy those days because the mails were to and from my mentor’s address and I get a copy of the print out whenever they concerned me.
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Bletchley Park – the birthplace of world's first electronic computer.
Image credit: Draco via Creative Commons.
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It was in Oxford, UK that I got my first official email when I moved there as a postdoctoral at the University of Oxford in 1996. It was a great experience indeed! It was here in Oxford, my exposure to the full-fledged internet came into being. It was in the historic Dyson Perrins Laboratory building (1916-2004, Department of Organic Chemistry) at the University of Oxford that I accessed for the first time some of the oldest, largest, and most modern chemical databases and journals on a daily basis on the internet in pursuit of my larger research interests. Though I visited Cambridge and London several times during my stay in England attending conferences or on collaborative work meetings, what I didn’t know at that time was the significance of Bletchley Park near Cambridge, which played a key role in the victory of Allied forces and the birthplace of world's first electronic computer. It’s really amazing to know that the entire Bletchley Park laboratory (close to where I worked 50 years later) was set up to decode wartime messages from German forces during the Second World War and the father of computing Alan Turing broke some of the highly secretive codes of German Enigma, which subsequently laid the foundation for one of the major discoveries the world has ever seen, i.e., the internet, and the World Wide Web almost fifty years later by Tim Berners Lee and Robert Calliau from CERN, Geneva ─ the Mecca of experimental Physics I would say, where Physicists from all over the world would love to visit, work, and collaborate with and while doing so they tend to make some of the best discoveries; a case in point being the discovery of ‘God Particle,’ Higgs Boson in 2012, which fetched this year’s Nobel Prize in Physics for Peter Higgs and Francois Englert ─ virtually transforming the world and the way we conduct our lives today. No surprise, World Wide Web would remain as a feather in CERN’s cap.
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| Internet users per 100 inhabitants based on data from International Telecommunication Union (ITU) Internet users 2001-2011 and Key Figures 2006-2013. Image credit: Jeff Ogden via Creative Commons. |
When I moved to Germany in ‘97 on an “Alexander Humboldt Fellowship” at the University of Saarlandes, Saarbrucken situated next to French border; my association with internet grew further just as the internet itself. Those were also the times internet was literally growing at astronomical speeds. More and more businesses went online and so are publishers, electronic journals etc., and the way we publish our books and research articles became as simple as the click of a mouse. What was a single server when Tim Berners Lee invented World Wide Web in late 1990 has grown into quarter-million servers by mid 1996 and this unparalleled growth of the World Wide Web also triggered the rapid rise of stock markets and economic growth during late 90s and early 2000 that's when the proverbial dot-com bubble or internet bubble or information technology bubble began to burst, which lead to the crash of global markets. I still vividly remember one of those weekly group meetings where we used to exchange ideas primarily of Chemistry; one of my mentors even brought up a discussion on the internet and how fast it was growing and the total number of web pages of information internet already boasts, etc. Well, a bunch of chemists discussing about the progress of internet – internet has come of age! Another connection comes to my mind in this saga of internet and the World War II as they are intertwined in a way (vide supra), my own visit to the city of Nuremburg during my stay in Germany. The city is famous for Nuremburg Trials, military tribunals held by the Allied forces for the prosecution of prominent members of the political and military leadership of Germany. From here on, internet has virtually revolutionized the way I conduct research and many other activities (blogging, http://www.drsirish.blogspot.com/) on a daily basis just as it did to the rest of the world. I just can’t imagine a day without the internet today and in a way, it has transformed the entire society for the better. As an aside, the indexed web contains at least 4.13 billion pages as on Sunday 27 October 2013 (http://www.worldwidewebsize.com/). As per latest estimate, 39% of world population use internet. While 75 out of 100 Europeans surf the web, this number is followed by 61/100 for North America, 32/100 for Asia & Pacific, and only 16 out of 100 for Africa.
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