The Wild, Wild, West Internet
During our training session today, we spent about an hour learning the history of the internet. For many people, SEO is a tough nut to crack. But I was delighted to find out how interested our team was in learning the history of this amazing thing called the “internet.” We use the internet everyday, but few of us take a moment to stand in awe of how it (has) and (is) and (will) transform our lives.
I’ll make a long blog short, but here are a few interesting things about the history of this amazing thing called the “net,” that most of us use everyday; maybe every hour (or more:)
1) The net started when a guy named Ben Franklin started figuring out the properties of electricity. (but wait, there’s more…)
2) William Sturgeon (1825) figured out how to make an electro-magnet operate through wires with Ben’s Electricity.
3) Joseph Henry (1830) showed people how you could do basic communication by picking up and dropping magnets through wire + electricity.
4) Samuel Morse (1835) invented a language using this principle. Let’s call it “Morse Code.” Ring a bell? (Literally)
5) Alexander Bell (1876) used Ben and William’s (and Joseph’s) ideas to invent a mechanism that re-produced sounds. Alex made it big (by getting to the patent office first by a few hours…) by doing “voice sounds.” I.E. The TELEPHONE.
6) John Baird (among others) (1926) First T.V. Set. Now we’re sending video over these wires.
7) 1947-1991: Many really smart folk invented computers (from transistors to current chips) and then…
BAMMM: ARPANET was created. How do we protect ourselves during a nuclear war? We better be able to communicate, and this meant creating a “network” of computers that still communicated even if some (or most) of them were wiped-out during a nice big Nuke Party.
9) 1991 W3 (WWW), the first server side systems that start to link the rest of us!
10) Search Engines start to organize all the info.
11) Search Engines Come, Search Engines Go.
12) Yahoo. Search Engines Start to “Stick”. (1994)
13) GOOGLE. (1997 “ish”) Thank you Larry and Sergy. If only I’d thought of that idea…!
14) ??? The Million Dollar Question.
That’s how we left it today. We had some really interesting comments and questions. But one thing I noticed: history seems to be repeating itself. I.e: Google buying YouTube.com. We talked today about how it’s like “Google owns all the phone systems, so now they’re starting to develop the T.V. network.” Wow. Maybe!
Hope you enjoy!
Chris
