In the past few decades, so many neat inventions had arisen as the internet became an integral part of our lives. From encryption to peer-to-peer networking, there have been big breakthroughs in how we communicate. The internet has even given a platform to independent inventors to advertise their products or seek funding.
Although, there are some more obscure and deep-rooted inventions that had gone into the internet that the average person doesn’t pay much attention to. Here is a list of inventions that I believe had a huge impact on how the internet works, yet are rarely discussed.
Pinging
Anyone who works in IT probably is aware of the most basic networking command, ping. This is a rather simple tech invention created by Mike Muuss, and with only 1,000 lines of code, it allows the user to check if a server is online.
While even the hobbyist programmer nowadays is capable of creating more complex programs, this was created back in the day when computer resources and programming know-how was extremely limited. Ping made its way in every operating system used today, and will probably continue to exist in the future.
The at “@” Symbol
If you’ve ever used email, twitter, or even Steemit, you will notice the prevalence of @ being used. While it may seem quite small, it was a concept introduced by Ray Tomlinson in the early 1970s.
The Unicode for @ is U+0040, and while some may see it as an internet-only thing, it has roots going back all the way to the Middle Ages in Bulgaria. Early contexts may have meant Amen, but its real definition is still debated.
Since it’s deep-rooted into email, it remains as a replacement for the word “at”, and software developers continue to use it as a symbol for replying to someone in forums, social media, and chat applications.
PHP
With Javascript, Python and static websites becoming more popular with newer generations of developers, we shouldn’t forget how to import PHP is for the majority of the web’s back-end infrastructure. In fact, WordPress and other popular content management systems still rely on it.
Personal Home Page/Forms Interpreter (PHP) was an early web invention in the 1990s, created by Rasmus Lerdorf when he was working on CGI development.
The syntax is quite simplistic and is quite familiar to Perl or C programmers. The language is still in active development, with version 8 coming out at the end of this year.
Perl Programming Language
While it’s being phased out to a certain degree, Perl is a general-purpose programming language that’s been extremely helpful in the world of UNIX & Linux system administration. It was created by Larry Wall in the 1980s to make report processing easier.
As it continued to be developed by the community, it became one of the most popular and dynamic languages used in the realm of UNIX.
Perl still has an upcoming release, 5.32, which includes bug fixes and core enhancements.
Berkeley Internet Name Domain
BIND is a bit more of an obscure one on this list, but it’s still used by lots of critical software. It was developed at the Berkely and was a core component in the release of the 4.3BSD operating system.
Caching DNS servers use BIND, which is at the backbone of how domain names resolve to websites’ servers. You are indirectly using this piece of software every day without even knowing.