KNOWLEDGE CORNER
TOYS AND BOARD GAMES
Various archaeological evidence suggests dolls as the oldest known toy. World's largest revenue earning toy company Mattel Inc, created the Barbie doll, one of the world's best selling dolls, in 1959. At one hand it has been given honours that are rare in the toy world on the other hand critics have believed the doll can enforce harmful ideas about body image on impressionable young minds. Saudi Arabia banned Barbie dolls in 2003, suggesting that the doll was a bad influence.
From the beginning most of the dolls are meant for girls. Hasbro understood this market gap and launched G.I.Joe, a range of masculine dolls representing U.S. soldiers. They also coined the term "Action figure" and since then it has become the generic description for any posable doll intended for boys. Now virtual dolls can be designed, dressed up, and played with on web sites such as Stardoll.
Children have played with miniature versions of vehicles since ancient times, with toy two-wheeled carts being depicted on ancient Greek vases. Modern equivalents include toy cars, miniature aircraft, toy boats, military vehicles, and trains. Hornby Railways of United Kingdom and Lionel Corporation of USA have been the leading brands of model railway. Matchbox and Hot Wheels, the two leading and rival die cast toy car brand were united under the same corporate banner in 1997, as Mattel bought the Matchbox. Mattel announced to differentiate the two brands in a way that Matchbox cars would be modeled after real and existing car models, while Hot Wheels cars would be designed not to resemble real cars but to inspire imagination.
The most played commercial board game in the world is monopoly. It is a redesign of an earlier game "The Landlord's Game" and based on the economic concept of the domination of a market by a single entity. Other popular board games are scrabble, checkers, chess, ludo. But many board games are now available as computer games and can be played online against a computer and/or other players and this has led to a relative decline in board games.
THE CREATION OF WORLD WIDE WEB
The first recorded description of the social interactions that could be enabled through networking was a series of memos written by J.C.R. Licklider of MIT in August 1962 discussing his "Galactic Network" concept. He envisioned a globally interconnected set of computers through which everyone could quickly access data and programmes from any site. In spirit, the concept was very much like the Internet of today. Licklider was the first head of the computer research programme at DARPA, starting in October 1962.
In late 1966 Roberts went to DARPA to develop the computer network concept and quickly put together his plan for the "ARPANET", publishing it in 1967. Computers were added quickly to the ARPANET during the following years, and work proceeded on completing a functionally complete Host-to-Host protocol and other network software. In December 1970 the Network Working Group (NWG) working under S. Crocker finished the initial ARPANET Host-to-Host protocol, called the Network Control Protocol (NCP).
This specification reduced the role of the network and moved the responsibility of maintaining transmission integrity to the host computer. The end result of this was that it became possible to easily join almost all networks together. ARPA funded development of the software, and in 1977 a successful demonstration of three different networks communicating was conducted.
Using concepts from earlier hypertext systems, English engineer and computer scientist Sir Tim Berners-Lee, now the Director of the World Wide Web Consortium, wrote a proposal in March 1989 for what would eventually become the World Wide Web. At CERN in Geneva, Switzerland, Berners-Lee and Belgian computer scientist Robert Cailliau proposed in 1990 to use "HyperText Network” to link and access information of various kinds as a web of nodes in which the user can browse at will, and publicly introduced the project in December.
A NeXT Computer was used by Berners-Lee as the world's first web server and also to write the first web browser, WorldWideWeb, in 1990. By Christmas 1990, Berners-Lee had built all the tools necessary for a working Web: the first web browser (which was a web editor as well); the first web server; and the first web pages, which described the project itself.
From the time being, programmers and computer engineers developed browsers, search engines and networking software to ease the web surfing facility. With the invention of electronic mail (email), the uses and sharing of information through the internet was globalized. Today social networks i.e. facebook, twitter and blogs have become popular among all over the world.
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