The Nineties in America - Salem Press (2009)

the Mosaic browser by Marc Andreessen and Eric
Bina in 1993, the development of Netscape Naviga-
tor in 1994 by Andreessen and Jim Clark, and the de-
velopment of Internet Explorer by Microsoft in

1995. These later browsers added improved graph-
      ics and multimedia support. Berners-Lee founded
      the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) in 1994,
      and this organization (replacing the ISOC) became
      the main standards body for Web-specific activities.
      The most-used application of the Internet today
      is e-mail. The first e-mail system was developed by
      Ray Tomlinson in 1971. In 1991, Philip Zimmerman
      introduced a way to send e-mail securely with his
      Pretty Good Privacy technology. The original e-mail
      format, defined by the request for comments (RFC)
      822, was quite limited, and in 1992 it was enhanced
      by the multipurpose Internet mail extensions
      (MIME) to support sending pictures and sound in
      e-mail. As HTML became a popular format for mes-
      sages, e-mail clients like Outlook Express and
      Eudora developed a technique of displaying e-mail
      as an HTML document, while encoding it in the
      RFC 822 format using MIME. The addition of the
      post office protocol (POP) in 1999 greatly enhanced
      reliable e-mail delivery.
      The secure socket layer (SSL) protocol was origi-
      nally developed by Netscape in 1994 and has been
      improved by many others since then. It provides a se-
      cure communications path for browsers and e-mail
      programs, and this has made e-commerce over the
      Internet much safer.

Impact Over the 1990’s, the Internet grew expo-
nentially. The number of Web servers, e-businesses,
and users greatly increased. Transmission speeds im-
proved throughout the world and changed the way
people communicate. In 1990, few used, or even
knew of, the Internet; by 2000, the Internet had be-
come an essential tool for most in the United States.

Further Reading
Baase, Sara.A Gift of Fire: Social, Legal, and Ethical Is-
sues for Computers and the Internet. Upper Saddle
River, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 2002. Interesting cover-
age of the social and legal issues surrounding the
Internet.
Hofstetter, Fred.Internet Literacy. New York: McGraw-
Hill, 2005. Provides a comprehensive introduc-
tion to the Internet and the World Wide Web.
Salus, Peter H.Casting the Net: From ARPANET to Inter-
net and Beyond. Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley,

1995. A good introduction to the development of
      ARPANET and the early days of the Internet.
      George M. Whitson III

See also Amazon.com; Apple Computer; CGI;

Computers; Dot-coms; DVDs; E-mail; Hackers; In-

stant messaging; Inventions; Microsoft; MP3 format;

PDAs; Silicon Valley; World Wide Web; Y2K problem.

 Inventions

Definition Newly created or improved devices,

objects, substances, techniques, or processes

During the 1990’s, legal, political, and economic factors

affected how patent officials determined which inventions

merited patent protection and how legislators and judges

perceived laws regulating patents. Rapid developments in

genetic and computer engineering intensified competition

to secure lucrative patents, and invention underwent a

transition in which corporations and industr y dominated.

By 1990, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office

(USPTO) had approved five million patents since it

was established in 1790. Entrepreneurs realized in-

novation was essential in the 1990’s for businesses to

compete in the global market, which thrived on elec-

tronics, biotechnology, and telecommunications in-

ventions, filing significantly more patent applica-

tions compared to prior decades. Those fields often

incorporated complex, emerging technology and

scientific ideas unfamiliar to many legal and patent

personnel, who, although sometimes lacking suffi-

cient scientific expertise, were in the position to eval-

uate inventions and rule on disputes regarding

which inventions were patentable and ownership of

rights. These were crucial issues in the escalating in-

fringement litigation initiated by inventors and busi-

nesses guarding their innovations and income those

inventions generated. Advocates and critics of pat-

ent reform discussed laws relevant to inventions in

the United States and internationally and how modi-

fications might affect invention practices and influ-

ence trade and economic conditions.

Patent Facts When the 1990’s began, U.S. patent

law recognized that rights to an invention belonged

to whoever initially envisioned it, but most coun-

tries’ patent laws stated that rights were assured to

inventors who first filed applications, complicating

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Inventions The Nineties in America