Internet milestones

IV. Here are seven points that appear in the text. Put the points in order from 1 to 7.

(A) ___ Language loss as a global problem

(B) ___ Classifying threatened languages

(C) ___ Preserving endangered languages

(D) ___ The impact of language disappearance

(E) ___ The importance of language and an overview of vanishing languages

(F) ___ How languages disappear

(G) ___ Red Thundercloud and the death of his language

TEXT 8

It was 1957, the middle of the Cold War. The Soviet Union had just launched the world's first artificial satellite, Sputnik I. Experiencing a national inferiority complex, the United States began exploring for ways to close the «science gap». In response, U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower created the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) to plan, fund, and organize scientific projects. ARPA brought together some of the most brilliant scientific minds in the United States. Within a few years, ARPA began to focus on networking communication and computer technology. In 1962, Dr. J. C. R. Licklider, a visionary scientist, wrote a series of memoranda in which he described what he called a «galactic network». Licklider envisioned a global system of interconnected computers through which people could access information from any site. He created a blueprint for the Internet long before it existed. Licklider convinced his successors at ARPA of the importance of developing this networking concept. The first test of a network came in 1969. A team led by Professor Leonard Kleinrock at UCLA hooked up its mainframe computer, the first node on the new network, to computers at the Stanford Research Institute, the University of California at Santa Barbara, and the University of Utah. The UCLA team tried to log in to the Stanford computer. In Los Angeles, Kleinrock began to type the word LOGIN. At the Stanford lab, the letters L, O, and G appeared and then the system crashed. Even so, the first long-distance computer network had been created.

This early network was called ARPANET. The network was initially funded by the U.S. Department of Defense. It was believed that, because of its weblike structure, the network could survive as a system of communication in the event of nuclear war. It was first used by organizations working on defense-related research. Soon, scientists and scholars from other fields began utilizing ARPANET. In 1985, the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) took over the system and renamed it NSFNET. The NSF created a «network of networks» capable of handling far more traffic. It linked universities, government agencies, and research centers, and connected to the European network, EUnet. By the early 1990s, Internet use was mushrooming. Commercial Internet service providers such as America Online brought many customers to the Internet. By 1994, there were an estimated 23 million users in more than 100 countries. By 2002, there were an astonishing 605.6 million users across the globe in virtually every nation. Dr. Licklider's dream of a galactic network had come true in 40 years.

One of the most important components of the Internet is the World Wide Web. The web is a system of Internet servers that support documents called web pages. These documents are formatted in a special script called HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) that allows one document to be linked to another. These files can support text, graphics, sounds, and video. Users can jump from one page to another by simply clicking on a hyperlink. Millions of companies, organizations, and individuals have developed websites to advertise products or share information. Web browsers such as Microsoft's Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator allow users to find web sites they are interested in and to visit those sites – to «surf the web»,in other words.

The World Wide Web was primarily developed by Tim Berners-Lee, when he was working at a physics research center known as CERN in 1990. CERN consists of many labs and scientific facilities located in the scenic Jura Mountains on the border between France and Switzerland. Because CERN is so huge and complicated, with hundreds of projects going on simultaneously, Berners-Lee developed a hypertext system to keep track of which scientists were working on which project and what resources they were using. Along with Robert Cailliau, Berners-Lee developed the first web browser. The first web browser to come to the public's attention was Mosaic, developed by Marc Andreesen and a group of associates. The web quickly expanded, and soon lived up to its «worldwide» designation. Although the web is only one portion of the Internet, it has proved to have had the most influence on the public. The web has enabled people to use their computers to buy groceries, get driving directions, help their children with their homework, get football scores, take classes, and perform countless other tasks. Even though many dot-com companies failed in the late nineties, the web has continued to grow rapidly.

If a key Internet component is the web, a key application is electronic mail, or e-mail is one of the most convenient forms of interpersonal communication, and the development of e-mail ranks with that of the telephone, telegraph, and radio. E-mail allows users to send text messages, files, and images almost instantaneously, with no mail charge, all over the globe. In 1971, a computer engineer named Ray Tomlinson working on ARPANET sent the first e-mail message. He sent it from one computer in his Cambridge, Massachusetts, lab to another in the same room. Tomlinson recalls, «I sent a number of test messages to myself from one machine to the other. Most likely the first message was QWERTYIOP or something similar». Tomlinson also proposed the locater symbol @ in e-mail addresses. In a 1978 paper, two Internet pioneers, J. C. R. Licklider and Albert Vezza, explained the popularity of e-mail: «One of the advantages of the message systems over letter mail was that, in an ARPANET message, one could write tersely and type imperfectly even to a person one did not know very well, and the recipient took no offense. Among the advantages of the network message services over the telephone was the fact that one could proceed immediately to the point without having to engage in small talk first, that the message services produced a preservable record, and that the sender and receiver did not have to be available at the same time».

As with all inventions, e-mail has resulted in some unintended results. One of the least desirable features of the Internet is spam. Spam can be defined as electronic junkmail, or unsolicited commercial messages sent to a large number of e-mail addresses. It takes its name from SPAM, a canned lunch meat made by the Hormel Company of Minnesota. The lunch meat was popularized by a British comedy group known as Monty Python's Flying Circus. In one Monty Python skit, a group of Vikings in a restaurant keeps singing the word «SPAM, SPAM, SPAM, SPAM» over and over, in increasing volume, drowning out other conversations, until they are told to shut up. Unwanted e-mail has many of the same characteristics as this chorus: it repeats itself, it is annoying, it interferes with communication, and it is difficult to stop. The first known instance of spam was in 1978, when the Digital Equipment Company sent a message to all ARPANET addresses on the West Coast inviting people to receptions to preview their new computer, the DEC-20. They were chastised for breaking the ARPANET 100 rules. In April 1994, two lawyers from Phoenix, Arizona, named Canter and Siegel, flooded the Internet with a message advertising their services in obtaining U.S. green cards. They enlisted the services of a programmer to post their message to every single newsgroup on USENET, the largest conferencing service on the Internet. Millions of people saw their ad, and 105 critics began calling this kind of message spam. Software programs called «spamware» that could generate mass mailings became available. Anti-spam software has been developed as well, but it is not very effective; it never eliminates all junk e-mail and it sometimes filters out legitimate messages. For the foreseeable future, at least, spam seems to be an unavoidable annoyance.

In a comparatively short time, the Internet has moved from a tool used only by a small community of scientists and scholars to an everyday component of millions of peoples' lives, changing the way people communicate, work, learn, and shop. Huge progress has been made and is continuing all the time. Just as exciting as what has already been created is what lies ahead: the prospect of new features that may have as much impact as the World Wide Web, e-mail, and other milestones on the Internet.

Дата добавления: 2014-12-27