QUIRKY SCIENCE

The Internet was invented during the cold war and launched in 1969. Yet it wasn’t made for the public. In fact, it was developed for the army to communicate quickly and secretly so that no spies could intercept and no bombs could disrupt the sharing of information! It was nothing like we know today. The Internet involved computers exchanging text, on a black field with green letters, and e-mail was only invented 2 years later because the developers needed a reliable tool to communicate. So only in 1972 was this application; electronic mail, introduced. The Internet we know now was actually a second, separate invention, launched over a decade and a half after the Internet was first launched, and was called the ‘World Wide Web’. Nobody was paying attention to Tim Berners-Lee and his pet idea, even though he had a radical new way for scientists to share data by linking documents to one another over the Internet! His proposal came back with the words "vague but exciting" written across the cover, so Berners-Lee took his invention to the people: with a website, bringing us the Internet we know today. Yet the Internet is only just out of its baby shoes, and is now being used to drive radical change in music and films, politics and business, changing the very way we see and interact with one another! From the computer screen to mass protests in the street, So what will the future bring us, how will the Web 3.0 change us? A web that can understand human needs?