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HISTORY OF THE INTERNET |
The ARPANET computer network made a large contribution to the evolution of e-mail. There is one report indicating experimental inter-system e-mail transfers on it shortly after its creation. Ray Tomlinson initiated the use of the @ sign to separate the names of the user and their machine in 1971.
A number of protocols were developed to deliver e-mail among groups of time-sharing computers over alternative transmission systems, such as UUCP and IBM's VNET e-mail system. E-mail could be passed this way between a number of networks, including the ARPANET, BITNET and NSFNET, as well as to hosts connected directly to other sites via UUCP.
In adition, UUCPnet carried a way of publishing text files that could be read by many others. The News software developed by Steve Daniel and Tom Truscott in 1979 would be used to distribute news and bulletin board-like messages. This would quickly grow into discussion groups on a wide range of topics. On ARPAnet and NSFNET similar discussion groups would form via mailing lists, discussing both technical issues, and the more frivolous items such as science fiction on the sflovers mailing list.
Finding what you need—The search engine
Even before the World Wide Web, there were search engines that attempted to organize the Internet. The first of these was the Archie search engine from McGill University in 1990, followed in 1991 by WAIS and Gopher. All three of those systems predated the invention of the WWW but all continued to index the Web and the rest of the Internet for several years after the Web appeared. There are still Gopher servers today.
As the Web grew, search engines and Web directories were created to track pages on the web and allow people to find things. The first full-text Web search engine was WebCrawler in 1990. Before WebCrawler, only Web page titles were searched. Another early search engine, Lycos, was created in 1993 as a university project, and was the first to be commercially successful. By August 2001, Google tracked over 1.3 billion web pages and the growth continues. In early 2004, Google's index exceeded 4 billion pages. On November 11, 2004, this number had doubled to just over 8 billion. On August 8, 2005, Yahoo! announced that its online search engine index spans more than 20 billion items.
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