University of Southampton
Academics working at the university include Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, Wendy Hall, inventor of Microcosm (hypermedia system) a predecessor of the World Wide Web, founding director of the Web Science Trust between the University of Southampton and MIT, José Antonio Bowen, President of Goucher College and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, Erich Zepler, who made leading contributions to radio receiver development, David Payne, who invented EDFA for use in fibre optics cables, Sir Barry Cunliffe, a pioneer of modern British archaeology, Ray Monk, the biographer of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Albie Sachs, former Judge of the Constitutional Court of South Africa, and Tim Holt, former President of the Royal Statistical Society and Office for National Statistics.
History of the Internet
In the 1980s, research at CERN in Switzerland by British computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee resulted in the World Wide Web, linking hypertext documents into an information system, accessible from any node on the network. Since the mid-1990s, the Internet has had a revolutionary impact on culture, commerce, and technology, including the rise of near-instant communication by electronic mail, instant messaging, voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) telephone calls, two-way interactive video calls, and the World Wide Web with its discussion forums, blogs, social networking, and online shopping sites. The research and education community continues to develop and use advanced networks such as JANET in the United Kingdom and Internet2 in the United States. Increasing amounts of data are transmitted at higher and higher speeds over fiber optic networks operating at 1 Gbit/s, 10 Gbit/s, or more. The Internet's takeover of the global communication landscape was almost instant in historical terms: it only communicated 1% of the information flowing through two-way telecommunications networks in the year 1993, already 51% by 2000, and more than 97% of the telecommunicated information by 2007. Today the Internet continues to grow, driven by ever greater amounts of online information, commerce, entertainment, and social networking. However, the future of the global internet may be shaped by regional differences in the world.