Before a Web was Spun (P1)

Today it's pretty easy to gander and marvel at your species' crowning achievement in the field of communications thus far, otherwise known as the Internet. Sometimes it's quite often confused with or just shortened to "the web."

But there is a history to be told, a story to behold. After all, you just didn't wake up one day to broadband speed and a "blue E" on your Windows desktop.

This series will provide you a fun and fascinating look at what transpired to create our wired world as it is today.

The reason the web was developed is quite simple; there's lots of stuff out there on the Internet, and hypertext is a very useful tool to display said information.

It allows us easily to write, let's say, this web page, even if I'm not actively writing it in HTML it's self. Before this revolution, though, in 1991 The University of Minnesota put out a new protocol entitled "Gopher," presumably because it would "go for" information. (Really, it's that simple. We nerds aren't the most clever of people, but we're often corny.)

Even before Gopher, you see, there was an Internet. It was difficult to manage and rummage through, however, because you generally had to download whole texts, graphics, and what not, before you got to see them. Google didn't exist, and so Gopher would have to do.

Your computer at that time could really do one that at once well, so if you wanted to view a text you'd click on a text, wait for it to download, then open it up with another program, closing Gopher.

This primitive service named after a rodent still revolutionized information exchange by making a simple interface with an easy to use syntax (Like all those little tricks you use when you're searching for something on Google.) to call up info. It was in theory a "file system" it's self, and this meant it was easily expandable in the future and easy to implement in a variety of ways.

It was also, like the World Wide Web is still today, a gateway to other uses of the Internets; File transferring (FTP), board posting (Usenet), and searching utilizing the Archie and Veronica engines.

But this all transpired in the early nineties, and the concept of the computer network has been alive and well since at least Xerox PARC and it's experimental office of the future. So let's take a step further back, so I can help explain this in a more fundamental way.

If you don't have a wireless card you're probably plugged into a modem via a wire. For many of you, it's probably by what is known in the connector industry as an "RJ45" jack, otherwise known as "ethernet." Or perhaps, "that big blue funky telephone cable thingie." If you dial-up, I feel for you, and you're probably using a standard phone line connection, otherwise known as "RJ11," 14, or 25 depending on the quality of the cable and the country you're in.

(Don't worry, you won't need to know this stuff. I just have a CCNA.)

Ethernet was invented as a cheap and useful way to connect computers together using copper wires that were easily shielded and pluggable.

After all, everything a computer understands is a binary code. When you click on a link to load up a new page your modem is transferring a bunch of ones and zeroes via copper, unless again you're wireless, or you're some time traveling person from the future where fiber optics have caught on at the business end of a network adapter.

So now we have a standard connection, and you know the rest when it comes to Gopher. But what about those crazy eighties? What was the Internet like then? Well, I'll tell you.

But first, keep two things in mind...

1. The infant Cable Television industry needed a reason to charge it's high prices compared to over-the-antenna (free) transmission and
2. Not many people had computers, but they sure had a video game system.
   

So, you used to get a lot of free floppies in the mail from some punk named "America Online," until they began to send you these useless frisbees. Well, I bet you didn't know that AOL was virtually one of the first companies on the Internet service scene.

"But come on dood, you know, not everyone has one of these new fangled computalators," you might say to me back in the eighties.

And this of course was the case, even after the Mac took off and allowed regular people to actually use a computer for once. But I bet many of you may have heard of a little gem called the Atari 2600. What service could you possibly want for your Joust playing hunk of faux woodwork? Well, if you like video games, and you're lazy, you could just get a GameLine account and download numerous games right from your phoneline and into your Atari.

Neat, huh? This was the case, all the way back in the early eighties until the great video game crash made the market afraid to produce, evolve, or try something new.

But obviously, this service, as cool as it was, was very limiting. For this idea to really get good, a guy named Steve Case amid many others would walk away from the ashes of Control Video Corporation to begin a service called QuantumLink, this time focusing on Commodore computers. More specifically, the C64 and C128.

As you can see, QuantumLink, although primitive, was a pretty decent system. It's existence is merely the next step of the BBS, which I will be covering about more in Part 2.

Technology, like fine wine, takes time to age and master. The difficulty was, in the beginning of the Internet, was funding research for furthering it's evolution. Early on someone decided to put that burden on consumers, while delivering to them toys to love, and a very useful service indeed.

QuantumLink did very well. You, of course, know it now as AOL, a subsidiary of Time Warner Communications. To keep the wheels turning, Steve Case and others gambled on the service being ready for early adopters.

But Q-Link's technology, wasn't just built from Control Video Corporation, it was actually a product of something even bigger. And that bigger boils down to a snowy day and two bored geeks....