Ceruzzi

was a team of Bell Labs researchers who invented the transistor in the 1940s; two decades later, another Bell Labs team developed the Unix operating system, to mention only the most visible fruits of Bell Laboratories’ research. And it was at Bell Labs where much of the theory of information coding, transmission, and storage was developed.

stored program principle, which has been central to the design of all digital computers ever since. This principle, combined with the invention of high-speed memory devices, provided a practical alternative to the ENIAC’s cumbersome programming.

client-server architecture, an innovation that came from a laboratory located in Silicon Valley and run by the Xerox Corporation. Large, dedicated mainframes, now called servers, store and manipulate massive amounts of data, delivering those data over high-speed networks to powerful personal computers, laptops, and other smart devices, which are nothing like the “dumb” terminals of the initial time-sharing model. These clients do a lot of the processing, especially graphics.

To connect a PC, an individual connected a modem, which translated computer signals into audio tones that the telephone network recognized and vice versa. The connection to the phone network was made by placing the handset into an acoustic cradle; later this was replaced by a direct wire. The user then dialed a local number and connected to a service. In addition to commercial services, one could dial into a personal local “bulletin board,”

To connect a PC, an individual connected a modem, which translated computer signals into audio tones that the telephone network recognized and vice versa. The connection to the phone network was made by placing the handset into an acoustic cradle; later this was replaced by a direct wire. The user then dialed a local number and connected to a service. In addition to commercial services, one could dial into a personal local “bulletin board,”

As he saw the growing amounts of data on the Internet, Berners-Lee explored a way of porting those concepts to the online world. His invention had three basic components. The first was a uniform resource locator (URL), which took a computer to any location on the Internet—across the globe, down the hall, or even on one’s own hard drive—with equal facility—a “flat” access device. The second was a protocol, called hypertext transfer protocol (http), which rode on top of the Internet protocols and facilitated the exchange of files from a variety of sources, regardless of the machines they were residing on. The third was a simple hypertext markup language (HTML), a subset of a formatting language already in use on IBM mainframes. That HTML was simple to learn made it easy for novices to build Web pages.

Berners-Lee also wrote a program, called a browser, that users installed on their computer to decode and properly display the information transmitted over the Web

Another feature that Netscape introduced was a way of tracking a user’s interaction with a Web site over successive screens, an obvious feature but something not designed into the Web architecture. Netscape’s browser did so by an identifying number called a “cookie”

When Netscape applied for an initial public offering of stock in August 1995, the resulting frenzy set off a bubble that made all the other Silicon Valley doings pale by comparison. The bubble eventually burst, but in its wake, the Web had established itself as not only an information service but a viable method of doing business.