Bollinger Center for Regional History at Southeast Missouri St. University

Another awesome story from one of our new graduate students, Rach Teasdale. Learn all about the Digital Heritage option for our MA in Public History program from a student's perspective! http://semohistory.org/2020/11/18/rach-teasdale/

A few weeks ago some of our students had the amazing opportunity to tour the Common Pleas Courthouse and adjoining Carnegie Library in their rehabilitation tran...sition into the new Cape Girardeau City Hall! Special thanks to TreanorHL Historic Preservation Principal Joy Coleman, and project manager Janet Getz for leading the tours and teaching our students about the project. It was an amazing experience! #SEMOHistoricPreservationProgram #HistoricPreservation #TreanorHL #CapeGirardeau

This week’s topic is about one of the most momentous inventions of communication in history, the internet. The internet has no singular inventor, as it has been... evolved over time. Though the internet got its start in the United States more than 50 years ago in response to the Sputnik Scare in 1957, it was originally a weapon to be used against the Soviet Union during the Cold War. A suggestion was soon created in 1962 by a scientist from M.I.T. and ARPA named J.C.R. Licklider. He proposed the solution of a galactic network of computers that could talk to one another. This would allow communication, even if a Soviet attack destroyed the telephone system. This plan went into action in 1965 when another M.I.T. scientist created a way of sending information from one computer to another that was called packet switching. This method breaks data down into blocks before sending it to its destination. This network was soon called ARPAnet. ARPAnet was soon tested on October 29, 1969. The test was set between two computers, one at UCLA and the other at Standford. Each of these computers were the size of a small home. The first message was LOGIN, but it crashed the network, with the second computer only receiving LO. The system started to grow, and by the end of the 1970s, the Transmission Control Protocol and the Internet Protocol were created by Vinton Cerf. These systems were created to allow communication between all computers on all the world’s mini-networks. These protocols transformed the internet, but it was changed again in 1991 by a man named Tim Berners-Lee, who introduced the World Wide Web. The Web itself became a web of information that allowed anyone on the Internet could access. Now, it was not only a platform for the sending of files as its original purpose was. Berners-Lee created the Internet as it is known today. The Internet transformed communication in a drastic way. Now, any information could be sent to anyone with Internet access across the globe. It’s used for commercial, for entertainment, or for just information gathering. It is the largest collection of information ever known to humankind. Learn more at: Stanford University, "A Brief History of the Internet," https://cs.stanford.edu//distributed-com/html/history.html Bollinger Center for Regional History at Southeast Missouri St. University

Learn about one of our amazing second-year graduate students, Augusta Welsh! https://semohistory.org/2020/10/29/augusta-welsh/

We had a great time dedicating the interpretive panels at the Friend Farm last Wednesday! We wish our donors, Nan and Neil Adams, could have joined us. If you're near the farm (at the intersection of W and 77 in Oran), stop and take a look!