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35 YEARS OF INTERNET, 10 YEARS OF ISPRS ONLINE
Fabio Remondino *, Tuan-chih Chen" *
“Webmaster, ISPRS; Institute of Geodesy and Photogrammetry, ETH Zurich, Switzerland
E-mail: fabio@geod.baug.ethz.ch
* Events Calendar Editor, ISPRS; Dept. of Civil Engineering, China Institute of Technology, Taipei, Taiwan
E-mail: profchen&oms 13.hinet.net
Commission VI
KEY WORDS: Internet/Web, Information, Education, Statistics, On-line
ABSTRACT:
The Internet and the most known part of it, the World Wide Web, are one of the greatest inventions of our time. The formation and
the growth of these big Net has changed the way we do business, communicate, entertain, retrieve information, and even educate
ourselves. This worldwide medium allows interaction with people without regard for geographic location and it is a great exchange
and source of data, information and software. Inside this electronic world, ISPRS is present since 1994 with the goal of providing
information, coordination and operations structure of its activities. In this paper, at first a short history of the WWW is presented,
with its main facilities and possibilities. In the second part, after a short introduction on the web site of the society, are presented
history, presence, and future plans about the use of Internet by ISPRS, and how ISPRS can make use of existing technologies to
improve what it now offered, including the educational strategy. The ISPRS Events Calendar is also presented.
INTRODUCTION
The Internet is big and global collection of networks connected
together in different ways to form a single entity. The Internet
is at once a broadcasting capability in the entire world, a
mechanism for information dissemination and a medium for
collaboration or interaction. between individuals and their
computers without regard for geographic location. Sometimes
called simply "the Net," it is a public, cooperative, and self-
sustaining facility accessible to hundreds of millions of people,
a worldwide network of networks in which a user with his
computer can get information from any other computer.
Nobody owns the Internet but there are some no-profit
organisations that define how we use and interact with
the Internet. The most widely used part of it is the World
Wide Web, created in 1990 as user-friendly face of the
information available on the Internet and, together with e-mails
and search engines, provides efficient access to an increasing
amount of information. Other services widely used are FTP, e-
mail and telnet.
After 35 years of developments and improvements, nowadays
there are more than 600 million people online. Everyday more
people use an online computer to find information, learn,
educate and communicate. But the presence and the access to
the Internet are not well distributed in all the countries as there
are still part of the world were the use of Internet has yet to
grow because it was politically repressed or the infrastructures
are still in development.
Inside this big electronic world, ISPRS is present since 1994
with the goal of providing information, coordination and
activities of its structure.
The goal of this work is to review the history of the Internet and
the WWW, as well as give an overview over the global network,
its services and its growth. Then is also described how ISPRS is
inserted since 10 years in this network and which initiatives are
taken to present the society to the world-wide public.
Corresponding author.
111
INTERNET AND WWW
2.1 The history [ISOC]
The precursor of the Internet is called ARPANet (Advanced
Research Projects Agency Network). The US Department of
Defence in fact developed it in the late 60's an experiment in
wide-area-networking that would survive to nuclear war. ARPA
was the answer to the rising American Cold War fear about
military inferiority, fuelled not least by the Russian Sputnik
success. In the autumn of 1969 the first ARPANET computer
was connected to the ARPANET's IMP node at the University
of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) and by the end of the
year, the network included four computers (the University of
California, Santa Barbara and the University of Utah). All the
computers used different operating systems and they were able
to talk to each other across the network.
During the 1970's, the ARPANET grew to connect research
institutes and laboratories supported by the Department of
Defence in various parts of the USA. Many of these were
university laboratories studying data processing and computer
networks, which developed the TCP/IP network protocol and its
applications for the Internet.
During the 1980's, the Internet was still considered to be a
temporary system designed for the research world while in the
1984 the TCP/IP data transmission protocol was adopted as the
US Department of Defence's official network standard. At the
same time that the Internet technology was being
experimentally validated and widely used amongst a subset of
computer science researchers, other networks and networking
technologies were being pursued: USENET, based on a UNIX
communication protocols; BITNET (Because It's Time
NETwork), started as a cooperative network at the City