| B |  | |
Balto (1922-1933)
The sled-dog who led the final leg of the relay that brought diphtheria antitoxin to Nome, Alaska in the frigid winter of 1925.
Baran, Paul (1926- )
Mathematician who developed influential theories about distributed communications and networking.
Barlow, John Perry (1947- )
Former songwriter for the Grateful Dead, now a widely read commentator on the Internet and society, especially on the implications of the Internet for the economic and legal status of intellectual property.< br/>
Papers: "The Economy of Ideas" and "Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace"
Battery
A device that generates a direct current by converting chemical energy to electrical energy. The first electrical batteries were developed in the late 18th and early 19th century.
Berners-Lee, Tim (1955-)
Computer scientist who invented the World Wide Web by creating a set of protocols for managing information on the Internet. These protocols included a language for displaying documents on different computers (HTML, the Hyper-Text Markup Language), a system for referring to documents stored on networked computers (URL, the Uniform Resource Locator), and a program for finding and displaying documents (the first browser).
Paper: "Information Management, A Proposal"
Billings, John Shaw (1838-1913)
American surgeon and librarian, a major figure in the organization and expansion of the Surgeon General's Library, later known as the Army Medical Library and then the National Library of Medicine. Billings developed a logical classification system for the Library, and founded two indispensable works of medical reference, Index Medicus, a monthly guide to current medical literature, and the Library's Index Catalogue.
Bit
Short for binary digit, the bit was invented to be a measure of information by Claude Shannon, a mathematician and electrical engineer working for Bell Labs. Eight bits equals one byte of information, the amount necessary to represent a single text character.
Bolt, Beranek and Newman or BBN
Company contracted by ARPA to construct and administer the ARPANET. Now a subsidiary of GTE.
Browser
Computer program used to retrieve and display documents available on the Internet. The best known browsers are Netscape and Internet Explorer.
[Back][Index][Close]
|
|
