Group items tagged

A brief history of the Internet written by some of its founders. From the website of the Internet Society.

Definition of a LAN, with pictures. The Internet can be thought of as a network of LANs.

This link gives information on the difference between a directory and a folder. The reason I found this link so useful was because it outlines the difference between the two for Mac and PC users.

Congratulations, Gordon, on being the very first to post! :)

I will say I'm not very impressed with the link, though -- it's a bit fuzzy on whether there is or is not a difference between a directory and a folder, except in a technical sense on Windows Vista. (I'd argue that in general there isn't, though I grant you there are special cases.) And you can't tell who wrote that piece, and it comes from the support database of a particular software company rather than from a site that's dedicated to explanations / teaching / learning / education. At least Wikipedia is deliberately trying to educate people, and it's better on this issue, I'd say, and provides a clearer argument that a directory is something structural in an OS whereas a folder is a visual "metaphor" for a collection of files, which may or may not be an actual directory: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directory_(computing)#Folder_metaphor

I've added a new avatar for our course Diigo group. It's based on a 1974 map of ARPAnet, the first "network of networks," and thus the precursor of today's Internet. I got it from Wikimedia Commons, which is a great source for all kinds of media that you're allowed to reproduce on the Internet.

Wikipedia page about the History of the Internet that I showed in class. Note that the first Internet connection (really, the first ARPANET connection) was made between UCLA and Stanford -- most early work on the Internet was done at universities and was funded by government grants. It was only after the launch of the Web in the early 90s that businesses began devoting resources to the Internet and the Web.

 The World Wide Web Consortium's definition of the difference between the Web and the Internet is understandably technical. It annoys me that there's a typo in which "TCP/IP" is misspelled "TPC/IP". Way to confuse people. 

An article often cited as "inventing" the web, or at least the idea of it. Vannevar Bush worked in information intelligence during the Second World War, and his work in that field led him to conceive of a better way of finding and managing information. I don't know that the web has really solved that, though!

This animated video is British, and that affects some of its perspective (Internet history books will tell you more about the American side), but it's particularly good for showing the structure of the Internet.