The Web

1969 ARPANET

The US Department of Defense established the Advanced Research Project Agency Network (ARPANET) in 1969 as a way to share resources across computers. This would be the first spark for the information revolution.

1983 TCP/IP Protocol

Two separate protocols that took many years of development in the 70s, this protocol suite that connects computers over a network was installed in the ARPANET and made standard for all military computers. Some consider this the "birthday" of the internet as computers had a common way of communicating with eachother.

1990 CERN and The Web Era

British computer scientist, Tim Berners Lee, worked at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN). While there, he created the first modern modern web server and graphical web browser. He called this connected network accessed through a web browser the "world wide web". Linking documents together called hypertext and hypermedia, this allowed all human knowledge to be intertwingled and easily accessible.

1994 The Browser Wars

The following era is analagous to the Unix Wars of the 80s, where AT&T's SystemV competed with the Berkley Software Distribution (BSD) for setting the standard for Unix. This era was ended with POSIX (Portable Operating System Interface) in 1988 which brought compability across distributions.

The next revolution was the web. Companies such as Amazon were created to jump on the e-commerce boom. Americans become curious of the web and started spending more time on the internet with AOL (America Online).

PHP 1993-95

First started in 1993 as a project for someone's personal home page (PHP), it was later released in 1995 and runs much of the web today.

Javascript 1995

Some guy at Netscape had to write a scripting language for the Netscape browser with a deadline of 10 days. They wanted this rolled out fast at a time critical period where the internet was booming and Netscape was in fierce competition against Microsoft's internet explorer for market share. Javascript today has evolved into what people now use as a general purpose programming language despite originally meant for small scripting tasks.

Angular 2010

First major Single Page Application (SPA) framework developed at Google. This marked the beginning of the heavy client side Javascript approach to building web applications. Instead of sending and recieving HTML from server to client in a traditional hypermedia fasion, JSON is used.

React 2013

First developed at Facebook, React is what many consider the industry standard today for progressive web apps/SPAs.

Vue 2014

Created by a former Google developer who used Angular, Vue was meant to keep the essential parts of Angular but create something very simple and lightweight instead. Today React and Next.JS are on one side and Vue and Nuxt.js on another side of the ecosystem. Both similar tools for building modern web apps but with different design philosophy.

Svelte 2016

Instead of monolithic Javascript frameworks (i.e SPAs), Svelte compiles HTML template to specialized code in advance which then manipulate the DOM directly. Despite a promising design and positive developer experience, Svelte has not seen the kind of market share or popularity of other frameworks like Vue, which despite being around the same age, are very different in terms of popularity.

HTMX 2020

Note: HTMX is really a rewritten Intercooler.js which dates back to 2013.

HTML E(X)tended is a very simple Javascript library that allows your to swap different parts of the page intead of a dramatic page reload. Secondly any element can submit HTTP requests, not just link and form tags. Instead of JSON being sent back and forth from the client and server such as in SPAs, HTMX uses historically accurate Rest API's, i.e client sends HTTP request, server returns HTML.