Front-end history and trends

The world’s first computer

  • February 14, 1946, the world’s first computer “ENIAC” (ENIAC) was born in the University of Pennsylvania. The invention of the computer was the result of the joint efforts of a group of researchers, but the design ideas of mathematician Von Neumann played a key role in it, so von Neumann is called the father of the modern computer.
  • Background: It was used by the U.S. Department of Defense for ballistic calculations in World War II.
  • Related attributes: It’s a monster, using 18,000 tubes, covering 170 square meters, weighing 30 tons, consuming about 150 kilowatts of power and performing 5,000 operations per second.
  • Meaning: It marked the beginning of the computer age.

Programming languages and operating systems

  • UNIX(Eunice)
    • When/where/Who: Born in 1969 at AT&T Bell LABS, developed by Ken Thompson, D.M.Ritchie and Douglas McIlroy.
    • Background: In the 1960s, Ken Thompson, a researcher at Bell LABS, had nothing on his hands and an itch to play Space Travel, a video game he had made to simulate voyages around the solar system. But the machine didn’t have an operating system, and the game had to use some of the functions of the operating system. So he started to develop the operating system, which was later named UNIX.
    • Features: multi-user, multi-task time-sharing operating system, with good security, confidentiality and maintainability.
  • Linux(Rinax)
    • When/Where/Who: On October 5, 1991, Linus Torvalds, a graduate student at the University of Helsinki, Finland, announced the birth of the Linux kernel. He was 21 years old.
    • Background: Linus used his Terminal Emulator to access newsgroups and mail on the university’s mainframe, and to make it easy to read, write and download files, he wrote his own disk drivers and file systems, which became the basis for the first Linux kernel.
    • Some are born to lead millions of people. Others are born to write software that will change the world. The only person who can do both is Torvalds.” Time magazine praised Linus Torvalds, the father of Linux. In time magazine’s readers’ poll of the 100 most important people of the 20th century, Linus was ranked 15th, while Gates, who had been the richest man in the world since the last years of the 20th century, was ranked 17th.
    • Features: free to use, free to spread, multi-user, multi-task, support a variety of platforms.
  • windows
    • Introduction: 1985 Microsoft developed a set of operating system, easy to use, personal computer favorite operating system. A graphical mode GUI is used.
  • Mac OS
    • Introduction: Developed in 1984, it is a GRAPHICAL operating system based on the Unix kernel. It is also the first successful graphical user interface operating system in the commercial field. It is seldom attacked by viruses.
  • FORTRAN
    • John backus, the world’s first high-level language, derived from an abbreviation for “FormulaTranslation”.
  • The C language
    • Time/Place/Character: In 1972, D.M.Ritchie(Dennis Ritchie) of AT&T Bell Laboratories in the United States designed C language on the basis of B language and took the second letter of BCPL as the language name.
    • Background: In the 1960s, Ken Thompson, a researcher at Bell LABS, had nothing on his hands and an itch to play Space Travel, a video game he had made to simulate voyages around the solar system. But the machine didn’t have an operating system, and the game had to use some of the functions of the operating system. So he started to develop the operating system, which was later named Unix. In 1970, Ken Thompson designed B language based on BCPL and wrote the first Unix system in B language. In 1971 Dennis Ritchie, who also loved Space Travel, joined Thompson’s project to develop UNIX in order to get an early start on games. His main job is to make THE B language more mature. In 1972, Dennis Ritchie designed C, known as the father of C and the father of UNIX. In 1973, the main body of C language was completed. Dennis Leach and Ken Thompson couldn’t wait to start rewriting UNIX completely with it.
    • Related attributes: high-level languages, structural languages, cross-platform at the code level, use Pointers
  • C++/Java
    • Introduction: C++ was modified from C in 1983. Java was developed by Sun Corporation in 1996 by James Gosling. It was acquired by Oracle Corporation in 2009.

Origin of the front-end

  • WWW/Web: World Wide Web

    • When/where/Who: In 1989 Tim Berners-Lee, a British computer scientist at CERN, invented the World Wide Web and applied for intellectual property.
    • Background: Tim Berners-Lee is known as the father of the World Wide Web, which he created to make it easier for scientists to share documents and papers with each other. Berners-lee is also the first recipient of the Millennium Technology Prize, the world’s largest technology award. And the recipient of the Turing Award.
    • Significance: It enables people all over the world to communicate with each other on an unprecedented scale. It is the most far-reaching and extensive media in human history. Changed the world, made a number of rich people such as: Amazon founder Jeff Bizos, Yahoo founder Jerry Yang, Netscape founder Marc Andreessen…

  • W3c: The World Wide Web Consortium, also known as the W3C Board

    • When/Where/Who: Founded in October 1994 at MIT computer Science Lab by Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web.
    • Background: To complete the collaboration between MIT and CERN, we aim to make the Web accessible to all users, regardless of their educational background, ability, financial resources, and physical disability.
    • What we do: Develop web standards specifications, more than 200 standards.

The time axis

  • Front-end history began in 1994 with the creation of the W3C by Tim Berners-Lee, the first version of Navigator by Netscape, the release of CSS, and the creation of server-side scripting PHP.
  • In 1995, Netscape introduced JavaScript to implement client-side computing tasks (such as form validation), invented by Brendan Eich.
  • In 1996, Microsoft introduced the iframe tag to realize asynchronous partial loading.
  • 1997 Netscape, Sun, Microsoft, Borland ECMA-262 (European Computer Manufacturers Association)
  • In 1999, W3C released the fourth generation HTML standard. In the same year, Microsoft introduced ActiveX for asynchronous data transfer. Immediately, various browser vendors implemented XMLHttpRequest. This marked the birth of Ajax, but it wasn’t until six years later that the word Ajax came out, especially after Google used it to create Gmail and Google Maps, that Ajax gained a lot of attention. Ajax is the key technology of Web page to Web application, which marks the arrival of Web2.0 era.
  • In 2006, XMLHttpRequest was officially adopted as a W3C standard. In the same year, John Resig released jQuery, which is mainly used to manipulate the DOM. The central idea is to take its elements and manipulate them. Thousands of plug-ins were created.
  • The introduction of Google’S V8 engine in 2008 changed the situation that the low performance of browsers restricted the development of front-end. The rise of modern browsers marked the development of front-end computing power from weak to strong.
  • The fifth generation of JavaScript was released in 2009, the same year AngularJS was born and later acquired by Google, ushering in a new era of dazzling fronds.
  • In 2009 Ryan Dahl released Node. Node is a v8-engine-based server-side JavaScript runtime environment, similar to a virtual machine, which means js has a place in the server-side language. If Ajax is the first leap forward for the front-end, Node is the second. It means that JavaScript has moved beyond the browser and taken the first step towards being all-inclusive.
  • Backbone. js was born in 2010
  • React and Ember were born in 2011
  • Vue. Js was born in 2014, the same year that the fifth generation HTML standard was released.
  • ECMAScript6, or ES6 for short, was released in 2015.
  • At this point, the separation of the front and back ends has become the trend, and data-driven frameworks have also formed a three-way battle, with Angular, React, and Vue each playing a leading role.

From the front and back ends do not separate to separate

  • The front-end is the development of the browser, where the code runs. The back end is server-side development, where the code runs.
  • In the early days of the Internet, front-end and back-end development was integrated, and front-end code was part of back-end code.
  • At that time, the back end was MVC development pattern, and the front end was just V in the back end MVC. The front-end engineer at the time was actually the template engineer, writing the page template.
  • Ajax changed everything. 2004: Gmail, 2005: Google Maps. The front end is no longer a template for the back end and can get all kinds of data independently. Ajax technology led to the birth of Web 2.0.
  • The front end gets the data through Ajax, so there’s a need to process the data. This led to the creation of a front-end MVC framework. One of the representatives is Backbone, but Backbone does not have C and only uses events to process UI logic.
  • Other frameworks propose the MVVM pattern, replacing controllers with View Models. Essence: View bound to View-Model, strong coupling between view and data model. Data changes are reflected in the view in real time without manual processing.
  • In the traditional architecture, the back end gives rendered HTML to the browser. In the SPA architecture, the back end gives data to JS, and JS renders HTML to the browser.
  • Separation of front and back ends: Ajax makes front-end applications rise, and the popularity of smart phones makes front-end support for multiple terminals. The front end is no longer the V in the back-end MVC, but a separate layer.
  • Only terminal engineers (mobile terminal, PC terminal, TV terminal, VR terminal……) And cloud engineers.

Reference 1 Reference 2