Text III

Word-study

Exercise 1. Check the transcription in the dictionary and read the words listed below.

Nouns:

irony, assertion, multimedia, fiber, contemporary, wire, community, hypertext.

Verbs:

to decommission, to consume, to associate.

Exercise 2. Read and translate the words and collocations.

Pivotal period, to stress the fact, apart from the fact, research proposal, funding authorities, the span of time, be it text or graphics, vehicle for online advertising, multimedia facilities, to fuel imagination.

Exercise 3. Match the synonyms.

Verbs

1) attribute	a) emphasize
2) highlight	b) discover
3) master	c) transmit
4) reveal	d) show
5) stress	e) promise
6) deliver	f) ascribe
	g) improve
	h) provide

Adjectives

1) enormous	a) constant
2) private	b) personal
3) contemporary	c) interactive
4) powerful	d) tremendous
5) previous	e) modern
	f) important
	g) preceding

Exercise 4. Make nouns from the following adjectives according to the model and translate them.

Adjective + -ness:

white, loud, clear, enormous, useful, attractive, exact, busy, user-friendly.

Exercise 5. Be attentive and remember the meaning of the underlined terms and words.

1. High-speed and long-distance networks connecting other networks to the Internet became major links and were termed «backbones».

2. A computer providing other computers on a Network with valuable data was called a «host».

3. WWW is an information space on the Internet unified by a common addressing system and containing a mix of text, sound, graphic and animation files which can have links between each other even if they are on different servers.

4. Browser is a program created for searching, navigating and displaying the computer material through the Web.

5. Data with links between separate elements that allowed users to move through information non-sequentially was termed as hypertext.

Comprehensive reading

A NET FOR ALL, AND A WEB TOO

The years 1989–96 was another pivotal period for what was effectively known as the Internet, stressing the fact that the original ARPANET had been followed by myriad of fast growing sub-networks operating in the U.S. and internationally. In 1989 the ARPANET was decommissioned, and in April 1995 the NSFNET reverted back to a pure research network, leaving a number of private companies to provide Internet backbone connectivity. At the same time the number of hosts as well as the network traffic grew at an enormous rate.

This veritable explosion in network use, apart from the fact that the personal computer became a household item in the same span of time, can be attributed to the result of a research proposal submitted to the funding authorities of the European Laboratory for Particle Physics in Switzerland, CERN (a French abbreviation for Conseil Europeen pour la Recherché Nucleaire). The title was «Worldwide Web: Proposal for a Hypertext Project», and the authors were Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau.

The World-Wide Web (also known as the WWW or Web) was conceived as a far more user-friendly and navigationally effective user interface than the previous UNIX-based text interfaces. The communications protocol devised for the WWW was termed HTTP (HyperText Transfer Protocol), hypertext being a navigational tool, linking data objects, be it text or graphics, together by association in what is effectively a web of pages, hence the use of the term «World-Wide Web». Berners-Lee and Cailliau describe the process as follows: «A hypertext page has pieces of text which refer to other texts. Such references are highlighted and can be selected with a mouse... When you select a reference, the browser [the software used to access the WWW] presents you with the text which is referenced: you have made the browser follow a hypertext link».

The WWW prototype was first demonstrated in December 1990, and on May 17, 1991 the WWW began to work due to granting HTTP access to a number of central CERN computers. As soon as browser software became available for the more common operating systems such as Microsoft Windows and Apple Macintosh, this new tool was immediately picked up by the Internet community.

The World-Wide Web, the simplicity of Internet access for private individuals, as well as the increasing user-friendliness of the software necessary to master the Internet protocols contributed to the meteoric rise of network use in the 1990s.

Browsing through the original WWW proposal reveals an irony very characteristic to the development of the Internet, in the face of its author's assertion that «the project will not aim to do research into multimedia facilities such as sound and video». In 1996 the present and future of the Internet, and the WWW in particular, points to a convergence of media types, and multimedia has indeed become the catch phrase of the day. Despite serious limitations in contemporary network capacity as far as to sound and video, new technologies constantly enable the increase of interactive network experiences. This development is supplemented by a constant innovation in hardware; today's Internet backbones transmit data packets at a speed up to 200 megabits per second (by comparison, the NSFNET backbone of 1986 ran at the blazing speed of 56 kilobits per second). Today the modems of most Internet users run at a speed of 28.8 kbit/s and a digital connection can deliver at a speed of up to 128 kbit/s, but the possibility of using the fiber optic cables bringing cable TV to millions of homes, for Internet data transmission opens up for private connections running at a speed of up to 10 Mbit/s. Another new technology, ASDL, promises to use the existing telephone copper wires for even higher transmission speeds.

But what will these network technologies deliver to the Internet user? In 1996 commercial Internet hosts have overtaken educational and governmental applications and these commercial interests clearly consider the Internet, and the WWW in particular, as a vehicle for online advertising and commerce. Hence the Net user of today can be described as a consumer. The Internet is still a powerful medium for communication, and has in many ways fulfilled the vision of interactive computing which fueled J. C. R. Licklider's imagination, but it remains to be seen whether it will be the democratizing medium of the 21st century, or merely become another static-filled television channel.

Notes:

household item – предмет домашнего обихода;

span of time – промежуток времени;

to submit a proposal – высказать предложение;

catch phrase – фраза дня.

Comprehension check

Exercise 1. Replace the passages in their logical order.

1) When the protocols were formed, much of the software and services that make up the Internet appeared. The basic services for remote connectivity, file transfer, and electronic mail were introduced in the mid and late seventies. The Usenet news system appeared in 1981 and the World Wide Web information system in 1989.

2)The Internet of today is only one third a research and educational network because of universities and institutes connected to it. However, commercial communications have taken over the majority of Internet traffic.

3) In 1990, the ARPANET had had many other networks connected to it. Later, its role as a network backbone was taken over by the NSFNET funded by the National Science Foundation. The networking companies and organizations, which provided the data connections to all the Internet hosts, continued in their goal of providing easy global network access.

4) The Internet developed from the project initiated by the US Department of Defense – Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA). The ARPANET, as it was then called, was designed to be a non-reliable network service for computer communications over wide area. In 1973 and 1974, a standard networking protocol, a communications protocol for exchanging data between computers on a network, emerged from the various research and educational programs involved in this project. This became known as TCP/IP or the IP suite of protocols.

5) These protocols enabled ARPANET computers to communicate irrespective of their computer operating system or their computer hardware. We call such protocols heterogeneous. UNIX operating system was developed in the same era and TCP/IP became almost synonymous with the UNIX which was spread throughout the many educational institutions around the US for a low cost. Multi-user systems such as UNIX soon became the most popular method of accessing the Internet.

Exercise 2. Answer the questions.

a) How many stages can you find in the process of the Internet creation and development?

b) Who created the Internet?

Language activity

Exercise 1. Summarize your knowledge on the Absolute Participial Construction.

Find the construction in the sentences. Translate the sentences into Russian.

1. Computers using binary language represented by a single binary digit (1 or 0), one of the earliest sections of the Internet was called Bitnet.

2. A high-speed network connection having been established between five computing centers, they in turn made their facilities available to the local universities.

3. Network is a system of computers connected together to share programs, data, etc., the Internet being effectively a worldwide network of networks.

4. The cost of local phone calls being not so high, using e-mail becomes the most spread use of the Internet.

5. Satellites have been a part of the world telephone and television networks for decades, some of them carrying calls over oceans, others broadcasting pictures to millions of viewers.

6. It was found that certain parts of the brain being damaged, men lost their ability to do certain things.

7. The earliest translation engines were based on direct translation principle, input sentences of the source language being translated directly into output sentences of the needed language.