From Nerd to Vice President: The man who helped create the Internet.
Our story begins with a man by the name of Albert Arnold Gore Jr, more commonly known as Al Gore. He was an American businessman and politician who served as the 45th Vice President of the United States from 1993 to 2001 under President Bill Clinton. However, what many people don't know is that he was also instrumental in the development of the internet. Al Gore had a passion for computers dating back to the late 1970s, and was described in an article as a "genuine nerd, with a geek reputation." He was the epitome of an Atari Democrat*, with his interests in Artificial Intelligence, fiber-optic networks and the desire to make network access more readily available to ordinary Americans.
Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn, who are widely regarded as the fathers of the internet, have made the following statement regarding Al Gore.
Back in the 1970s Al Gore promoted the idea of high-speed telecommunications as an engine for both economic growth and the improvement of our educational system. He was the first elected official to grasp the potential of computer communications to have a broader impact than just improving the conduct of science and scholarship ... the Internet, as we know it today, was not deployed until 1983. When the Internet was still in the early stages of its deployment, Congressman Gore provided intellectual leadership by helping create the vision of the potential benefits of high speed computing and communication. As an example, he sponsored hearings on how advanced technologies might be put to use in areas like coordinating the response of government agencies to natural disasters and other crises.
In 1986, Al Gore initiated the development of the High Performance Computing and Communication Act of 1991, which became known as "The Gore Bill". The bill, signed into law by President George H.W Bush on December 9, 1991, provided $600 million in funding for high performance computing and the establishment of the National Research and Education Network. President Bush anticipated that the bill would facilitate discoveries in the field of DNA research, enhance free trade with foreign markets, and promote collaboration between government, academia, and industry.
The development of Mosaic in 1993 is widely considered to be one of the most significant outcomes of the Al Gore Bill. This web browser for the World Wide Web is credited by many experts as the catalyst for the Internet Boom that took place in the 1990s.
The creation of the Mosaic Web browser took place at the University of Illinois, where a group of programmers, including Marc Andreessen, who later founded Netscape, collaborated on the project. According to Andreessen, "If it had been left up to private industry, it wouldn't have happened," highlighting the significance of Al Gore's Bill in enabling the development of the browser.
Following his departure from the White House in 2001, Al Gore remained active in the technology industry and continued to engage with emerging technologies. He currently serves as a member of the Board of Directors for Apple Inc. and holds a senior advisory role at Google.
*Atari Democrat: During 1980s and 1990s the term Atari Democrat referred to Democratic Legislators who believed that the support and development of high tech related businesses would stimulate the economy and created jobs.
The Browser That Changed Everything: Mosaic and Netscape's Impact on the Internet
Following the funding from Al Gore's Bill, the development of the Mosaic project began in December 1992 at the University of Illinois. Marc Andreessen announced the release of Mosaic's first version, version 0.5, in January 1993. While there were other browsers available during this time, none had the same impact on public usage of the Internet as Mosaic.
Marc Andreessen, along with James H. Clark and four other former students and staff from the University of Illinois, led the team that developed Mosaic. They went on to establish Mosaic Communications Corporation, which later evolved into Netscape Communications Corporation and developed the popular browser Netscape Navigator. Mosaic is generally recognized as the beginning of the web as we know it. In October 1994, an article about Mosaic made the following observation:
Mosaic is the celebrated graphical "browser" that allows users to travel
through the world of electronic information using a point-and-click
interface. Mosaic's charming appearance encourages users to load their
own documents onto the Net, including color photos, sound bites, video
clips, and hypertext "links" to other documents. By following the links –
click, and the linked document appears – you can travel through the
online world along paths of whim and intuition. Mosaic is not the most
direct way to find online information. Nor is it the most powerful. It
is merely the most pleasurable way, and in the 18 months since it was
released, Mosaic has incited a rush of excitement and commercial energy
unprecedented in the history of the Net.
Web browsers like Mosaic emerged as the killer applications of the 1990s. Joseph Hardin, who was the director of the NCSA group responsible for developing Mosaic, revealed that by mid-1994, downloads of the browser were reaching up to 50,000 per month.
As of November 1992, there were only twenty-six websites in the world. However, in 1993, the release year of Mosaic, the browser's "What's New" page indicated that nearly one new website was being added every day. The availability of Mosaic and its graphical derivatives was the driving force behind the explosive growth of the Web, which grew to over 10,000 websites by August 1995 and millions by 1998. Bob Metcalfe summed up the pivotal role of Mosaic in the following words:
In the Web's first generation, Tim Berners-Lee launched the Uniform Resource Locator (URL), Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), and HTML standards with prototype Unix-based servers and browsers. A few people noticed that the Web might be better than Gopher. In the second generation, Marc Andreessen and Eric BIna
developed NCSA Mosaic at the University of Illinois. Several million
then suddenly noticed that the Web might be better than sex. In the third generation, Andreessen and Bina left NCSA to found Netscape…
The origin of Netscape Navigator
After graduating in 1993, the main creators of the Mosaic web browser, Marc Andreessen and Bina, went on to establish Netscape, and its inaugural press release was issued on October 13, 1994. They decided to offer their new browser, Navigator, free of charge to all non-commercial users, with beta versions available for free download in November 1994 and the full version 1.0 becoming available in December 1994.
After the release of Navigator in 1994, Mosaic's popularity as a standalone browser started to decline as Navigator offered significant improvements over the original Mosaic browser.
In 1994, Netscape introduced a groundbreaking innovation: on-the-fly display of web pages, where text and graphics would appear on the screen while the web page was still downloading. Previous web browsers would not display a page until all graphics had been loaded over the network connection, leading to users staring at a white loading page for several minutes. With Netscape, users with dial-up connections could start reading the text of a web page within seconds of entering a web address, even before the rest of the page had finished downloading. This made the web much more user-friendly and accessible to the average user.
In the late 1990s, Netscape continued to enhance Navigator's features to remain the technical leader among all web browsers. Netscape's engineers introduced several new features to Navigator, such as cookies, frames, proxy auto-config, and most notably, JavaScript. The introduction of JavaScript to Navigator enabled web developers to create more dynamic and interactive web pages. This innovation revolutionized the way websites were designed and laid the foundation for modern web development.
JavaScript: Netscape's Quest for Interactive Web Pages
Around a decade ago, Jeff Atwood, the founder of Stack Overflow, argued that JavaScript was poised to become the future of programming and boldly proclaimed that "Any application that can be written in JavaScript will eventually be written in JavaScript." As we approach 2023, it's clear that his prediction has come to fruition. JavaScript has maintained its status as one of the most popular programming languages, dominating both front-end and back-end web development, and has even extended its reach to unconventional devices like refrigerators, solidifying its ubiquitous presence in the digital age.
NetScape's ambitious project to create a programming language that would run directly on web browsers began with the idea of using Java, but it was soon determined that this approach would not work. NetScape then hired Brendan Eich to lead the project. In just ten days, the first version of JavaScript was born, initially named Mocha. This first version of JavaScript already contained many of the features that are now familiar in modern JavaScript, such as first-class functions, dynamic typing, and prototypal inheritance, which were inspired by the Java language.
In September 1995, Mocha was given a new name, Livescript, and it was included in the initial beta releases of Netscape Navigator 2.0. However, a few months later, the name was changed once again to JavaScript. That same year, Netscape submitted the language to ECMA International, a nonprofit standards organization for computer and communication systems. The first edition of the standard specification was released in 1997, standardizing the language. The development of ECMAScript, the official name for JavaScript, continued, and two more versions were released shortly after: ECMAScript 2 in 1998 and ECMAScript 3 in 1999 (ES2 and ES3).
After the release of ES3 in 1999, there was a decade-long period of silence where no changes were made to the official standard version. During the initial days of this period, some work was happening on the ES4 version and discussions were underway regarding the inclusion of features such as classes, modules, static typings, destructuring, and more. These features were slated for release in 2008, but due to political differences concerning language complexity between Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and others, the project was abandoned for a significant period of time.
In 2009, ECMAScript 5 (ES5) was released with a main focus on fixing compatibility and security issues. However, it took a long time for developers to adopt the new standards, and many continued to use ES3 without realizing the benefits of ES5.
In 2015, a new version of ECMAScript was released with significant updates and new features, called ES6. This version was designed to make writing complex applications easier and more efficient with features such as Classes, Modules, Arrow Functions, Enhanced Object Literals, Template Strings, Destructuring, Default Parameter Values, Let and Const, Iterators, Generators, Maps, Sets, Proxies, Symbols, Promises, Math, Object APIs and more. The 6th standards version of ECMAScript was initially named as ES2015, but it was later renamed to ES6. It was released in June of that year and marked a major milestone in JavaScript's development. From that point on, new versions of ECMAScript have been scheduled to be released annually in June.
In June 2016, the ECMAScript 2016 (ES7) was released. This version did not introduce many changes, and only two features were added: the exponentiation operator and Array.prototype.includes.
In June 2017, ECMAScript (ES8) was released, with the addition of a major new feature: async functions. Other notable features included Object.values() and Object.entries(), String padding, Object.getOwnPropertyDescriptors, trailing commas in function parameter lists and calls.
The latest version of ECMAScript, released in June 2022, is ECMAScript 2022 (ES13), which brought several new features to the language. Some of the key additions include:
- Await
- New class elements: public and private instance fields, public and private static fields, private instance methods and accessors, and static blocks inside classes
- The #x in obj syntax for private fields
- The cause property on Error objects, which can be used to record a causation chain in errors
- The at method for Strings, Arrays, and TypedArrays
- Object.has0wn, a convenient alternative to Object.prototype.hasOwnProperty.
The conclusion of this chapter should not intimidate you!
Keep working hard! Keep studying and you'll never regret it! And remember, Rome wasn't built in a day!
- @pedro_furquim
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