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Timeline BC |
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~ 1900 BC: Egyptian writers use non-standard  Hieroglyphs in inscriptions of a royal tomb; supposedly this is not the first but the first documented example of written cryptography
1500 an enciphered formula for the production of pottery is done in Mesopotamia
parts of the Hebrew writing of Jeremiah's words are written down in "atbash", which is nothing else than a reverse alphabet and one of the first famous methods of enciphering
4th century Aeneas Tacticus invents a form of beacons, by introducing a sort of water-clock
487 the Spartans introduce the so called "skytale" for sending short secret messages to and from the battle field
170 Polybius develops a system to convert letters into numerical characters, an invention called the Polybius Chequerboard.
50-60 Julius Caesar develops an enciphering method, later called the Caesar Cipher, shifting each letter of the alphabet an amount which is fixed before. Like atbash this is a monoalphabetic substitution.
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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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