| Sam Young Newsletter |
Issue 105, November 2005
Hi guys,
For those of you who just have to know how things started, check out the beginnings of The Wonderful World Wide Web below.
If you have ever accidentally deleted a wonderful image from your camera, then the Image Recovery Tip is just what you need to prevent it happening again.
Don't forget, if you want to be taken off my mailing list, click here to send me a reply e-mail and I will remove your name.
| The Wonderful World Wide Web |
I have been reading a bit about why and when the internet was set up of late.
As a military contract, let by the US Department of Defence’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), the internet was at least partially designed to provide a communications network that would work despite partial destruction in nuclear attack; that if the most direct route was not available, routers would direct network traffic via alternate routes. It could have all so easily have gone horribly, horribly wrong.
What redeemed the internet, in my opinion, was that the contract was let to four US universities and BBN Technologies (Bolt, Beranek & Newman; all ex-MIT). Brought online in 1969, ARPAnet was started, created and nurtured in academia; and the resulting 'net' was focused more on sharing resources than on hiding them.
While the US government (cf National Science Foundation) funded the internet backbone until 1995, most of the protocols were hammered out by universities or quasi-university organisations. TCP/IP architecture was initially proposed by BBN, developed throughout the 1970s and universally adopted in 1983. BITNET (Because It's Time Network) connected IBM mainframes in the educational community and around the world, providing mail services from 1981. More and more protocols were hammered out to make working between systems easier, faster and more seamless, including CERN's (the European Laboratory for Particle Physics) new protocol for information distribution, hypertext, in 1989. It became what we now know as the World Wide Web in 1991, and hypertext was universally adopted in 1994.
In the twenty years from 1973 to 2003, internet users grew from 2,000 to 448,170,000. There are probably at least 100 million more users than that now, with the Canadian-developed MUSH (Municipal, University, School & Hospital) network schemes improving connectivity in OECD countries to get all schools, municipal authorities and hospitals fully wired (see issue 98 for details).
Following are the key events, I think, in the development of our wonderful world wide web.
| Year | Event |
| 1968 | ARPA contracts with BBN to create ARPAnet |
| 1969 | ARPAnet goes online with 4 hosts |
| 1972 | Ray Tomlinson of BBN adapts email for ARPAnet, picking the @ symbol to link usernames and addresses |
| 1973 | 2,000 ARPAnet (cf Internet) users Intel’s Chair, Gordon Moore, announces publicly that the number of transistors on a microchip will double every year and a half. Later known as "Moore’s Law", this held true for over twenty years (capacity now doubles about every three months). |
| 1974 | Early TCP/IP architecture development |
| 1977 | 111 hosts online |
| 1981 | BITNET connects IBM mainframes for email |
| 1983 | TCP/IP protocol universally adopted |
| 1984 | The internet - all 1000 hosts - converts en masse to TCP/IP for messaging Domain Name System (DNS) introduced |
| 1986 | The National Science Foundation (NSF) funds "NSFnet", as a cross-US 56 Kbps backbone for the Internet |
| 1987 | 10,000 plus hosts online |
| 1988 | NSFnet backbone upgraded to T1 (1.544Mbps) |
| 1989 | CERN's protocol for information distribution, hypertext, goes live McGill University in Montreal creates an archiver named "Archie" which will periodically reach out to all known & available ftp sites, list the files, and build a searchable index 100,000 plus hosts online New Zealand connects to NSFnet |
| 1991 | University of Minnesota develops a simple menu system to access files on their LAN, called "gopher". University of Nevada further develops gopher with a "spider" which crawls global gopher menus, collecting links and retrieving them for the index The World Wide Web is really born ARPAnet ceases to be 10 websites online |
| 1992 | 1,000,000 plus hosts online 50 websites online |
| 1993 | Marc Andreessen at the National Center For Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) develops a graphical browser "Mosaic". Later, Andreessen develops Netscape |
| 1994 | Universal adoption of hypertext as the web's lingua-franca David Filo and Jerry Yang from Stanford start Yahoo! 10,022 websites online |
| 1995 | The World Wide Web goes completely private as the NSF stops backbone funding Dawn of ecommerce age eBay goes online Jeff Bezos starts Amazon.com RealAudio, an audio streaming technology, lets surfers listen in real-time |
| 1996 | Yahoo! goes public |
| 1997 | Amazon.com goes public |
| 1998 | Larry Page and Sergey Brin of Google Inc open their door for business - a garage door - in Menlo Park, California E-auctions take off eBay goes public 1,681,868 websites online |
| 2001 | 100,000,000 plus hosts online 36,276,252 websites online |
| 2002 | Blogging takes off |
| 2003 | 448,170,000 internet users, according to Nationmaster Flash mobs, gatherings organised via the Net, start in New York and quickly go global |
| 2004 | Google Inc becomes a publicly listed company |
| 2005 | 350,000,000 plus hosts online Google & Yahoo! actively pursue pay per click advertisers, and start to beat the Yellow Pages in the advertising game. Search engines get 66% of online local searchers, while Yellow Pages get 34% 70,392,567 websites online |
Some elements of this timeline were abstracted with permission from H'obbes' Internet Timeline by Robert H'obbes' Zakon, www.Zakon.org/robert/internet/timeline/
For more information on the history of the web, go to the Internet Society at http://www.isoc.org/internet/history/, to http://www.walthowe.com/navnet/history.html or to http://www.zakon.org/robert/internet/timeline/
| Image Recovery Tip |
Ever deleted the wrong photo from your camera? Well, below is a fantastic tip that might save your image the next time you get a bit snappy on the delete button.
Cameras don't have fancy file systems, but plain, old FAT — File Allocation Tables. They divvy up memory card space into standard sized chunks; when you take a picture, the camera allocates unused chunks for your picture and marks the chunks "in use." Then when you delete the picture, it changes the file name a bit to indicate "the next time you need any chunks, you can use all of the chunks that used to belong to this picture." So your picture isn't really deleted until the camera re-uses those chunks on the memory card.
Here's how you can try to reclaim your lost image:
- Don't use the camera (well, don't use the memory card that holds the pictures, anyway)
- Go to the SnapFiles Restoration site at http://www.snapfiles.com/get/restoration.html and download the latest freeware version of their simple, zipped .exe Restoration programme called something like Rest2514.exe
- If the card is in the camera, connect the camera to your PC in the usual way (probably via a USB port)
If the card is not in the camera, buy or borrow a card reader, stick the card in the reader, and connect the reader to your PC - Double-click the downloaded Rest2514.exe file. Restoration will ask for a location to place a folder (probably REST2514), to contain the program files. In the "Extract To" dialogue box, click Reference and choose a good location (such as c:\Program Files). Then click OK
- Find the folder you extracted, then run Restoration.exe (eg if you extracted to c:\Program Files, run the following program: "c:\Program Files\REST2514\Restoration.exe")
- Follow the on-screen instructions to find and recover the deleted files.
Thanks to Woody Leonhard from Windows Secrets Newsletter (https://windowssecrets.com/info) for this excellent tip on how to get pictures back after mistaken deletion. And thanks to Brian Kato for giving away such great Restoration software that makes such undeletes possible.
| AutoFit Text in Excel |
When text is too long to fully display as a Microsoft Excel column header, there are three methods you can use to fit the text in the cell, as follows.
- AutoFit: use AutoFit to enlarge the cell enough to fit the contents (NB, this can result in too much white space in the rest of the row or column)
- Select the cell
- Go to Format | Column | AutoFit Selection
-
- Wrap Text: you can wrap the label text within the selected cell (NB, this method will increase the height of the cell)
- Select the cell
- Go to Format | Cells. The Format Cells dialogue box will appear (or key Ctrl & 1 to bring the Format Cells dialogue box up)
- Go to the Alignment Tab
- Tick the Wrap Text check box (you can also change in the Horizontal alignment ddl whether you want the text to align left, right or centre)
- Click OK
-
- Resize: you can resize the contents to fit within the cell (NB, text can sometimes shrink to the point of illegibility):
- Select the cell
- Go to Format | Cells. The Format Cells dialogue box will appear (or key Ctrl & 1 to bring the Format Cells dialogue box up)
- Go to the Alignment Tab
- Tick the Shrink To Fit check box
- Click OK
-
One of these will work, whatever your requirement!
| TLAs for SMEs |
Here are this newsletter's TLAs for you;
- CAT 5E, A. ANSI/EIA Standard 568 that specifies "categories" for data rates that twisted pair cabling systems can sustain effectively, commonly referred to as "CAT". 5E is the latest, rated at 1000 Mbps, but is currently in prototype at 10000 Mbps (just for a comparison, analog phone lines are 1 Mbps)
- ANSI/EIA, American National Standards Institute/Electronic Industries Association.
Please feel free to email me with any TLAs that you want to get the bottom (meaning!) of.
| Tips, Short+Hot Keys |
Continuing our Outlook hot key list, this time we look at all you can do with the plain old alphabet keys with Alt, Shift, Ctrl. In this newsletter we take letters Q to T;
- Outlook "Mark as read" Ctrl & Q
- Outlook "Create a new meeting request or open an existing meeting request" Ctrl & Shift & Q
- Outlook "Reply to a mail message" Ctrl & R
- Outlook "Reply all to a mail message" Ctrl & Shift & R
- Outlook "Save" Ctrl & S
- Outlook "Post in this folder" or "Post selected item to a designated folder" Ctrl & Shift & S
- Outlook "Increase indent" Ctrl & T
- Outlook "Decrease indent" Ctrl & Shift & T
| Hot Linx |
If you want to find out who's going to win the Southern Traverse, then check out the Adventure Racing website at http://www.arworldchampionship.com/home.asp
Are mobile workplaces the future? See what Business Week thinks at http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/05_25/b3938612.htm
If you are so confused about the shifting seas of politics that you no longer know where you stand, then, to find your true political affiliation, try the quiz on http://www.politicalcompass.org/
There is a website that is dedicated to the meaning, graphology (?!) & grouping of common signs. Check it out at http://www.symbols.com/encyclopedia/01/index.html
Catch you again soon!! E-mail your suggestions to me here
