Appendix A Summary
After my lookover of Appendix A ‘The Internet and the World Wide Web” it informed me on what the internet really is and how it works in all aspects. I grew up basically right at the start of Youtube and stuff, and I wasn’t aware of where, when, and how the internet started. The first notable thing that really stood out to me was that due to the rise of internet usage in the 90’s, that the supply of IPv4 addresses ran out by 2011. I always thought that IP’s were automatically generated, with the creation of a new computer. The internet was originally a research project by the US government and Department of Defense, but got shut down in 1995. I was unaware that the internet was never originally meant to be commercial use and makes me wonder what the world would be like today without it. The biggest development was the World Wide Web, which has upwards of 3b users a day, in places I didn’t even know could have access to the internet, nearly half the world!
I use Google Drive, Docs, Slides all of the time, seeing how files were transferred back in the day really opened my eyes to how lucky we are to have the technology that we have today. In 1989 two CERN workers, Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau found a more efficient way to share their papers and data with other research communities. Together they created hypertext to make this process seamless, (at the time of course). Hypertext servers were used to store files written in hypertext markup. All of this was the workup towards HTML, which he developed a few years after hypertext. I was unaware that HTML was basically the blueprint for webpages that we all know and use every single day.
I use OperaGX as my main, everyday browser on my PC. Seeing old text based browsers makes me realize how much easier and user friendly they are to use nowadays in the 21st century. Microsoft's Internet Explorer pretty much monopolized the entire web browser market for most of the mid-1990s to the early 21st century. After other companies started creating different versions of their own browsers, Internet Explorer basically got overshadowed and slowly started losing lots of daily users. Nowadays the most commonly used browsers are Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, and Microsoft Edge. I was unaware that multiple companies owned the ability to sell internet access, Large ISP’s sell access to CSP’s, and so on all the way down to the consumer. I’ve always had a pretty mid-tier internet connection and learning that you can easily upgrade your speeds just by having a better plan from your provider. I thought it was always just restricted depending on where you live.