Q&A

1) Gopher Servers are: A) Text-based Documents

2) Software that locates, accesses and displays web pages is known as: a web
browser
3) The company that refined many of the design concepts that form the basis of today’s
Graphical user interface was: Xerox
4) Facebook is an example of a: Social Networking Application
5) Relative and absolute referencing is a concept that is present in: Spreadsheet
software.
6) The first widely available browser was: Mosaic
7) VisiCalc was developed by: Briklin and Frankston
8) The computer that is widely recognized as the first to include a fully bit-mapped
display is the: Alto
9) Archie was an early example of: Search Engines
10) Tim Berners-Lee developed: The first web browser

11) Compare and contrast CLI with GUI

Command line interfaces (CLIs) are text based where a user is prompted on where they
enter the lines of codes and commands specific to the system. GUI uses graphical icons and
audio to do the same activity in a less time-consuming manner. CLI is still popular when
automation or specialised tasks are being done. Web and database servers still use CLI.

12) List in point form, significant historical events that affected the development of
today’s search engine.

- Archie was the first form of search engine; however it required the user to know the
file’s precise location and name.
- 1993, Gopher Servers were used to contain text based documents with Veronica and
Jughead used for searching Gopher servers
- Web Indexing and web directories used robots nicknamed spiders to search for
websites
- Spiders however lacked enough intelligence to be able to understand what file was
being searched for
- 1994 Galaxy web directory were used to find documents and couldn’t find websites
efficiently
- Yahoo appears
- WebCrawler could find URLs, titles and entire text of each page or document.
- 1995 DEC released AltaVista – advanced search
- MetaCrawler forwards queries to other search engines and records results
- 1996 Google began as uni research project which ranked pages on its usefulness
and relativity.
13) List in point form, significant historical events that affected the development of
today’s Web Browsers.

- 1990 - 1st web browser developed at CERN by Tim Berners-Lee

- 1990-1992 most information ,that was text-based, was sent and received using FTP
(File Transfer Protocol) and Gopher servers.
- 1993 saw the emergence of web browsers and websites. The first widely used
browser was Mosaic, which was the forerunner to Netscape. Its first version was
written for UNIX machines. Other browsers were being developed, like the open
source code-based Amaya, which is still in use today. By the end of 1993, Mosaic
was also available for Windows and Macintosh computers. At the time, there were
500 web servers running, with Digital Equipment Company serving as the first
commercial website.
- 1994 web - 3 million servers operating
- Mosaic Netscape became a company related to 80% of the web browser market.
This allowed Netscape to make its browser free for students, teachers and
researchers.
- 1995 Microsoft released Windows 95 with Microsoft Network (MSN) client software
included with the intention of establishing MSN as a parallel network to the WWW,
but this attempt was unsuccessful, and Netscape continued to dominate with the
release of Navigator 2. MS IE 2 also existed and had a modest but significant
following.
- 1996 MS published IE 3 and made it available for free as the battle for market share
started! Similar functionality in both, parallel technologies being developed using their
own standards, web designers at the time frequently producing two versions of their
sites for each browser, and 10 million web servers in operation.
- Although the W3C was supposed to be the official standards body, the two most
popular browsers did not adhere to the standards.
- In 1997, MS packaged IE4 with Windows95, integrating the web using the "Active
Desktop" concept. Netscape filed lawsuits against MS, accusing the company of
"taking trade-marked concepts because they held a large share of the OS market.
- 1998 Because of Microsoft's dominance, Netscape lost the majority of its market
share. As a result, it became an open source product called Communicator and
released its source code as the Mozilla project. In 1999, AOL bought Netscape, and
in 2003 it gave the project its initial funding. It is now developing the Firefox browser
as well as other open source SW tools and web applications.

14) Describe innovative design features first used in the VisiCalc spreadsheet.

It allowed automation and other robot-related functions to complete repetitive tasks or

calculations. It was the first step into inspiring people to learn coding. This was also
the start of computer learning where input could be automatically ordered in a way
that the user desired.
 15) Microsoft Corp is often painted as “the bad guy”, yet really they have been highly
effective in making the personal computer the success it has become today. Discuss
this statement.

Microsoft is seen as an evil company because of the lawsuit cases they have with Apple, in
which Apple accused Bill Gates’ company of stealing the GUI concept. Apple had created a
genius software however they lacked the applications to use it to its potential. Microsoft and
Apple reached an agreement that Microsoft would create apps for Apple’s use. Bill Gates
realised that the GUI could be changed to become even more efficient and intelligent. He
started developing his own version of GUI to improve it. In short, Microsoft indeed used the
concept of GUI, however they changed it so it was similar but not the same, so by law it was
not an original copy of the GUI. The vision Bill had later turned into developing Windows
which turned into a shell that operated on top of MS DOS CLI based OS. So In the end,
Microsoft stole a concept from another company and sold it as their own, but the copy was
much more refined than the original hence making it a better option in the PC market. Apple
becomes enraged that such a thing has happened and insists that Microsoft stole the basic
concept.