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Early Tools and Machines |
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Already in early cultures men aimed at the expansion of their physical power in order to facilitate work processes. In prehistoric times first tools made of stone were developed and some thousand years later followed by the invention of simple mechanical devices and machines such as the wheel, the lever and the pulley.
Next came the construction of powered machines. Waterwheels, windmills and simple steam-driven devices did no longer require human strength to be operated. In China for example trip-hammers powered by flowing water and waterwheels were already used some 2,000 years ago.
Besides tools and machines, which helped to extend men's physical power also devices to support mental faculties, especially in the field of mathematics, were invented. As soon as 3000 BC the abacus was developed in Babylonia. By using a system of sliding beads arranged on a rack early merchants could make computations, which helped them keep track of their trading transactions.
Also, early "industrial- robot devices" were developed as soon as 250 BC. The clepsydra, or water clock, which improved upon the hourglass by employing a siphon principle to automatically recycle itself, was constructed by a Greek inventor and physicist, Ctesibius of Alexandria.
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World Wide Web (WWW)
Probably the most significant Internet service, the World Wide Web is not the essence of the Internet, but a subset of it. It is constituted by documents that are linked together in a way you can switch from one document to another by simply clicking on the link connecting these documents. This is made possible by the Hypertext Mark-up Language (HTML), the authoring language used in creating World Wide Web-based documents. These so-called hypertexts can combine text documents, graphics, videos, sounds, and Java applets, so making multimedia content possible.
Especially on the World Wide Web, documents are often retrieved by entering keywords into so-called search engines, sets of programs that fetch documents from as many servers as possible and index the stored information. (For regularly updated lists of the 100 most popular words that people are entering into search engines, click  here). No search engine can retrieve all information on the whole World Wide Web; every search engine covers just a small part of it.
Among other things that is the reason why the World Wide Web is not simply a very huge database, as is sometimes said, because it lacks consistency. There is virtually almost infinite storage capacity on the Internet, that is true, a capacity, which might become an almost everlasting too, a prospect, which is sometimes consoling, but threatening too.
According to the Internet domain survey of the Internet Software Consortium the number of Internet host computers is growing rapidly. In October 1969 the first two computers were connected; this number grows to 376.000 in January 1991 and 72,398.092 in January 2000.
World Wide Web History Project, http://www.webhistory.org/home.html
 http://www.searchwords.com/
http://www.islandnet.com/deathnet/
http://www.salonmagazine.com/21st/feature/199...
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