Tag: World Wide Web

Queen Elizabeth II uses Zoom to talk to the Australians Of The Year

Article

Queen Elizabeth II tells the 2022 Australians of the Year they’re doing ‘marvelous work’ in Zoom interview – ABC News

‘Cheeky’ Queen jokes as she congratulates Australians of the Year | Queen’s platinum jubilee | The Guardian

Daily Telegraph Video – Click or tap to play on YouTube

 

My Comments

As part of her Platinum Jubilee celebrations, Queen Elizabeth II placed a Zoom videocall to Australia to talk to this year’s Australians Of The Year.

Here, she had called Government House in Australia where the Governor-General was with Shanna Whan, Dylan Alcott, David Hurley, Linda Hurley, Valmai Dempsey and Dr Daniel Nour with Dylan Alcott, the retired wheelchair tennis player who won the Golden Slam, making a cheeky remark to the Queen to liven up the conversation.

But this shows that Queen Elizabeth II is no stranger to new communications technologies that came forth through her reign.

She was the first monarch to broadcast the annual Christmas Message to the Commonwealth by television and, subsequently, the Internet. These messages were broadcast using the ever-evolving and increasingly ubiquitous TV technologies like the 625-line technology that was sharper than the original 405-line technology, colour TV, satellite broadcasting and digital TV.

In 1958, Her Majesty placed the first direct-dial long-distance telephone call in the UK by placing a call from Bristol to the Lord Provost at Edinburgh. She celebrated this technology’s 50th anniversary in 2008 by making a videocall between the same locations using Skype and the Internet.

As well in 2004, she knighted Sir Tim Berners-Lee who is the inventor of the World Wide Web which made the Internet what it is able to do today.

This Zoom call effectively synthesised television, the self-dial long-distance phone call and the World Wide Web together as a single instance that linked the UK to Australia in a visual manner.

It is effectively summing up Her Majesty’s long reign that has been underscored with many different communications technologies coming to fruition through that time.

Even the 2012 London Olympics honours the founder of the World Wide Web

Article

Berners-Lee, Web take bow at Olympics | CNet

Video

http://youtu.be/KHmF14LaX5g

My Comments

Those of you who have watched the Opening Ceremony for the 2012 London Olympics may have thought that the obvious factors associated with Britain like the cottages, Industrial Revolution or the Beatles would be honoured in this ceremony.

But think again!. As part of a celebration of the recent popular history that was centred around life in an archetypal UK semi-detached house, there was a chance to celebrate the foundation of what has made the Internet-driven life tick. Here, the house fell away to reveal Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the founder of the World Wide Web, tap out a Tweet that celebrated this milestone to the connected lifestyle on the invention that he stood behind.

This ceremony definitely integrated the foundation stone of the home network and the connected life, with some of us perhaps watching it through the Web rather than on regular broadcast TV.

The World Wide Web–now 20 years old

Articles

World Wide Web turns 20, finally shakes that acne problem | Engadget

The Web Is 20 Years Old Today | TechCrunch

My Comments

What happened in computing before the Web

Since the home computer came on the scene in the 1970s, there were previous efforts to present information on these computers in a navigable form. This was achieved through the use of dedicated computer programs that were written for this task. These programs became important when the modem, which facilitated computer-to-computer communications over the telephone, came on the scene through 1980.

The main examples of these were the bulletin-board systems and “videotex / viewdata” systems which used the computer as a terminal. They typically provided a forum functionality and an information display which allowed people to bring up pages of information. But they were often difficult to operate unless you were a diehard computer nerd.

Apple was one of many companies who tried to popularise the concept of hyperlinking information where one could click on an item of information and be led to another related item of information. They did this with a program called “HyperCard” which allowed the user to link between various “cards” of information, whether in the same deck or another deck.

There were even attempts to provide indexable information for computer systems, including networked computers by using indexing software like “Isys”. These programs crawled collections of word-processing documents, spreadsheets and the like and created an index which could be searchable and the results viewed in an elementary form.

The establishment of the Web

After 1991, various universities worked towards establishing two standards that were critical to the establishment of the Web. These were “HTTP” (HyperText Transport Protocol), an efficient file-transfer protocol which allowed text to be delivered as a stream suitable for hyperlinking; and “HTML” which was a way of marking up text files to permit formatting or hyperlinking of information.

These worked hand in glove with the Internet and there was a clear advantage that one could link to information using a standard “Uniform Resource Locator” or “URL”. This link could point to file on any computer in the world on the Internet. All it required was the use of a program called a “Web Browser” and the first of these was “Lynx” which worked with text-based terminals. With this one, users had to enter a number pointing to the desired link they wanted to follow.

But, as the Internet became popular, there was the rise of the graphical Web browser which was in the form of Netscape Navigator. This became more intense with Windows 95 having integrated Internet functionality and Microsoft releasing Internet Explorer for this platform.

The Web as an integral part of computing

This led the World Wide Web to become the Internet’s killer application in a similar vein to how pre-recorded video movies being available for hire through video stores became the video cassette recorder’s killer application in the 1980s. We now started to talk of home pages and of “surfing the Web” or “surfing the Net” as an activity.

The Web has also provided support for a universal interface for every sort of computer-driven activity, whether browsing and searching for information, managing one’s email or doing one’s banking and shopping online. It had then led to the boom-bust cycle that was known as the “dot-com” era where companies could set up behind a Web page with a “dot-com” name and make money out of the domain names or the goods and services they could sell online.

As the Web matured, the ability to provide snazzier presentation on the Web sites allowed media companies to work on snazzier home pages, which ended up becoming “portals” that featured news and other information. These became the jump points for people to start their Web-browsing sessions from and they ended up also offering task-specific features like Web-based mail and messaging.

It also led on to the growth of the “Social Web” which is driven by the end user. This is in the form of Web logs or “blogs” which are effectively micro-journals; or social networks like Facebook where one can interlink with other like-minded people.

Even the way the Web is viewed has changed from since it first started. Previously, it was viewed on a regular desktop or laptop computer. Now the last five years has seen the Web being viewed on mobile phones, especially smartphones like the Apple iPhone; tablet computers like the Apple iPad and now the television screen with the new generation of “smart TVs” and video peripherals like Blu-Ray players or games consoles.

Conclusion

The World Wide Web has become one of the major cornerstones for the connected lifestyle by popularising access to online information and commerce, and simply popularising the Internet iteself.

Happy 20th Birthday World Wide Web

BBC NEWS | Technology | Pioneer of cyberspace honoured

 BBC NEWS | Technology | Pioneer of cyberspace honoured

Video Interview with Professor Wendy Hall about Web Science

My Comments

One thing I have seen as a benefit from cyberspace and the World Wide Web is the ability to build a world-wide library of information. It had also given the Internet its breakthrough or “killer” application, in a similar vein to VHS videotape being given its breakthrough application in the form of video-movie rental in the ‘80s. This concept was talked about by Bill Gates in his first book, “The Road Ahead” (Amazon shortcut).

It has eventually led to the use of the HTML-based user interface for controlling network devices from PCs in the home and beyond and the ability to regard the Web browser as an “applications terminal”.