March 31, 2016

A Little History of the World Wide Web

http://www.w3.org/History.html

A Little History of the World Wide Web

Sir Tim Berners-Lee is a British computer scientist. He was born in London, and his parents were early computer scientists, working on one of the earliest computers.

Growing up, Sir Tim was interested in trains and had a model railway in his bedroom. He recalls:

“I made some electronic gadgets to control the trains. Then I ended up getting more interested in electronics than trains. Later on, when I was in college I made a computer out of an old television set.”

After graduating from Oxford University, Berners-Lee became a software engineer at CERN, the large particle physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland. Scientists come from all over the world to use its accelerators, but Sir Tim noticed that they were having difficulty sharing information.

“In those days, there was different information on different computers, but you had to log on to different computers to get at it. Also, sometimes you had to learn a different program on each computer. Often it was just easier to go and ask people when they were having coffee…”, Tim says.

Tim thought he saw a way to solve this problem – one that he could see could also have much broader applications. Already, millions of computers were being connected together through the fast-developing Internet and Berners-Lee realised they could share information by exploiting an emerging technology called hypertext.

In March 1989, Tim laid out his vision for what would become the Web in a document called “Information Management: A Proposal”. Believe it or not, Tim’s initial proposal was not immediately accepted. In fact, his boss at the time, Mike Sendall, noted the words “Vague but exciting” on the cover. The Web was never an official CERN project, but Mike managed to give Tim time to work on it in September 1990. He began work using a NeXT computer, one of Steve Jobs’ early products.

Tim's original proposal. Image: CERN — Tim’s original proposal. Image: CERN

By October of 1990, Tim had written the three fundamental technologies that remain the foundation of today’s Web (and which you may have seen appear on parts of your Web browser):

HTML: HyperText Markup Language. The markup (formatting) language for the Web.
URI: Uniform Resource Identifier. A kind of “address” that is unique and used to identify to each resource on the Web. It is also commonly called a URL.
HTTP: Hypertext Transfer Protocol. Allows for the retrieval of linked resources from across the Web.

Tim also wrote the first Web page editor/browser (“WorldWideWeb.app”) and the first Web server (“httpd“). By the end of 1990, the first Web page was served on the open internet, and in 1991, people outside of CERN were invited to join this new Web community.

As the Web began to grow, Tim realised that its true potential would only be unleashed if anyone, anywhere could use it without paying a fee or having to ask for permission.

He explains: “Had the technology been proprietary, and in my total control, it would probably not have taken off. You can’t propose that something be a universal space and at the same time keep control of it.”

So, Tim and others advocated to ensure that CERN would agree to make the underlying code available on a royalty-free basis, for ever. This decision was announced in April 1993, and sparked a global wave of creativity, collaboration and innovation never seen before. In 2003, the companies developing new Web standards committed to a Royalty Free Policy for their work. In 2014, the year we celebrated the Web’s 25th birthday, almost two in five people around the world were using it.

Tim moved from CERN to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1994 to found the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), an international community devoted to developing open Web standards. He remains the Director of W3C to this day.

The early Web community produced some revolutionary ideas that are now spreading far beyond the technology sector:

Decentralisation: No permission is needed from a central authority to post anything on the Web, there is no central controlling node, and so no single point of failure … and no “kill switch”! This also implies freedom from indiscriminate censorship and surveillance.

Non-discrimination: If I pay to connect to the internet with a certain quality of service, and you pay to connect with that or a greater quality of service, then we can both communicate at the same level. This principle of equity is also known as Net Neutrality.
Bottom-up design: Instead of code being written and controlled by a small group of experts, it was developed in full view of everyone, encouraging maximum participation and experimentation.

Universality: For anyone to be able to publish anything on the Web, all the computers involved have to speak the same languages to each other, no matter what different hardware people are using; where they live; or what cultural and political beliefs they have. In this way, the Web breaks down silos while still allowing diversity to flourish.

Consensus: For universal standards to work, everyone had to agree to use them. Tim and others achieved this consensus by giving everyone a say in creating the standards, through a transparent, participatory process at W3C.

New permutations of these ideas are giving rise to exciting new approaches in fields as diverse as information (Open Data), politics (Open Government), scientific research (Open Access), education, and culture (Free Culture). But to date we have only scratched the surface of how these principles could change society and politics for the better.

In 2009, Sir Tim established the World Wide Web Foundation. The Web Foundation is advancing the Open Web as a means to build a just and thriving society by connecting everyone, raising voices and enhancing participation.

Please do explore our site and our work. We hope you’ll be inspired by our vision and decide to take action. Remember, as Tim tweeted during the Olympics Opening Ceremony in 2012, “This is for Everyone”.

http://www.w3.org/History.html

A Little History of the World Wide Web

See also How It All Started presentation materials from the W3C 10th Anniversary Celebration and other references.
from 1945 to 1995

1945

Vannevar Bush writes an article in Atlantic Monthly about a photo-electrical-mechanical device called a Memex, for memory extension, which could make and follow links between documents on microfiche

1960s

Doug Engelbart prototypes an "oNLine System" (NLS) which does hypertext browsing editing, email, and so on. He invents the mouse for this purpose. See the Bootstrap Institute library.
Ted Nelson coins the word Hypertext in A File Structure for the Complex, the Changing, and the Indeterminate. 20th National Conference, New York,Association for Computing Machinery, 1965. See also: Literary Machines. Note: There used to be a link here to "Hypertext and Hypermedia: A Selected Bibliography" by Terence Harpold, but the site hosting the resource did not maintain the link.
Andy van Dam and others build the Hypertext Editing System and FRESS in 1967.

1980

While consulting for CERN June-December of 1980, Tim Berners-Lee writes a notebook program, "Enquire-Within-Upon-Everything", which allows links to be made between arbitrary nodes. Each node had a title, a type, and a list of bidirectional typed links. "ENQUIRE" ran on Norsk Data machines under SINTRAN-III. See: Enquire user manual as scanned images or as HTML page (alt).

1989

March: "Information Management: A Proposal" written by Tim BL and circulated for comments at CERN (TBL). Paper "HyperText and CERN" produced as background (text or WriteNow format).

1990

May: Same proposal recirculated
September: Mike Sendall, Tim's boss, Oks the purchase of a NeXT cube, and allows Tim to go ahead and write a global hypertext system.
October: Tim starts work on a hypertext GUI browser+editor using the NeXTStep development environment. He makes up "WorldWideWeb" as a name for the program. (See the first browser screenshot) "World Wide Web" as a name for the project (over Information Mesh, Mine of Information, and Information Mine).; Project original proposal reformulated with encouragement from CN and ECP divisional management. Robert Cailliau (ECP) joins and is co-author of new version.
November: Initial WorldWideWeb program development continues on the NeXT (TBL) . This was a "what you see is what you get" (wysiwyg) browser/editor with direct inline creation of links. The first web server was nxoc01.cern.ch, later called info.cern.ch, and the first web pagehttp://nxoc01.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html Unfortunately CERN no longer supports the historical site. Note from this era too, the least recently modified web page we know of, last changed Tue, 13 Nov 1990 15:17:00 GMT (though the URI changed.)
November: Technical Student Nicola Pellow (CN) joins and starts work on the line-mode browser. Bernd Pollermann (CN) helps get interface to CERNVM "FIND" index running. TBL gives a colloquium on hypertext in general.
Christmas: Line mode browser and WorldWideWeb browser/editor demonstrable. Acces is possible to hypertext files, CERNVM "FIND", and Internet news articles.

1991

February: workplan for the purposes of ECP division.
26 February 1991: Presentation of the project to the ECP/PT group.
March: Line mode browser (www) released to limited audience on "priam" vax, rs6000, sun4.
May: Workplan produced for CN/AS group
17 May: Presentation to "C5" Committee. General release of WWW on central CERN machines.
12 June: CERN Computer Seminar on WWW.
August: Files available on the net by FTP, posted on alt.hypertext (6, 16, 19th Aug), comp.sys.next (20th), comp.text.sgml and comp.mail.multi-media (22nd). Jean-Francois Groff joins the project.
October: VMS/HELP and WAIS gateways installed. Mailing lists www-interest (now www-announce) and www-talk@info.cern.ch (see archive) started. One year status report. Anonymous telnet service started.
December: Presented poster and demonstration at Hypertext'91 in San Antonio, Texas (US). W3 browser installed on VM/CMS. CERN computer newsletterannounces W3 to the HEP world.Dec 12: Paul Kunz installs first Web server outside of Europe, at SLAC.

1992

15 January: Line mode browser release 1.1 available by anonymous FTP (see news). Presentation to AIHEP'92 at La Londe (FR).
12 February: Line mode v 1.2 annouced on alt.hypertext, comp.infosystems, comp.mail.multi-media, cern.sting, comp.archives.admin, and mailing lists.
April: 29th April: Release of Finnish "Erwise" GUI client for X mentioned in review by TimBL.
May: Pei Wei's "Viola" GUI browser for X test version dated May 15. (See review by TimBL)At CERN, Presentation and demo at JENC3, Innsbruck (AT). Technical Student Carl Barker (ECP) joins the project.
June: Presentation and demo at HEPVM (Lyon). People at FNAL (Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (US)), NIKHEF (Nationaal Instituut voor Kern- en Hoge Energie Fysika, (NL)), DESY (Deutsches Elektronen Synchrotron, Hamburg, (DE)) join with WWW servers.
July: Distribution of WWW through CernLib, including Viola. WWW library code ported to DECnet. Report to the Advisory Board on Computing.
August: Introduction of CVS for code management at CERN.
September: Plenary session demonstration to the HEP community at CHEP'92 in Annecy (FR).
November: Jump back in time to a snapshot of the WWW Project Page as of 3 Nov 1992 and the WWW project web of the time, including the list of all 26 resoanably reliable servers, NCSA's having just been added, but no sign of Mosaic.

1993

January: By now, Midas (Tony Johnson, SLAC), Erwise (HUT), and Viola (Pei Wei, O'Reilly Associates) browsers are available for X; CERN Mac browser (ECP) released as alpha. Around 50 known HTTP servers.
February: NCSA release first alpha version of Marc Andreessen's "Mosaic for X". Computing seminar at CERN. The University of Minnesota announced that they would begin to charge licensing fees for Gopher's use, which caused many volunteers and employees to stop using it and switch to WWW.
March: WWW (Port 80 HTTP) traffic measures 0.1% of NSF backbone traffic. WWW presented at Online Publishing 93, Pittsburgh.The Acceptable Use Policy prohibiting commercial use of the Internet re-interpreted., so that it becomes becomes allowed.
April: April 30: Date on the declaration by CERN's directors that WWW technology would be freely usable by anyone, with no fees being payable to CERN. A milestone document.
July: Ari Luotonen (ECP) joins the project at CERN. He implements access authorisation, proceeds to re-write the CERN httpd server.
July 28-30: O'Reilly hosts first WWW Wizards Workshop in Cambridge Mass (US).
September: WWW (Port 80 http) traffic measures 1% of NSF backbone traffic. NCSA releases working versions of Mosaic browser for all common platforms: X, PC/Windows and Macintosh.September 6-10: On a bus at a seminar Information at Newcastle University, MIT's Prof. David Gifford suggests Tim BL contact Michael Dertouzos of MIT/LCS as a possible consortium host site.
October: Over 200 known HTTP servers. The European Commission, the Fraunhofer Gesellschaft and CERN start the first Web-based project of the European Union (DG XIII): WISE, using the Web for dissemination of technological information to Europe's less favoured regions.
December: WWW receives IMA award. John Markov writes a page and a half on WWW and Mosaic in "The New York Times" (US) business section. "The Guardian" (UK) publishes a page on WWW, "The Economist" (UK) analyses the Internet and WWW.
Robert Cailliau gets go-ahead from CERN management to organise the First International WWW Conference at CERN.

1994

January: O'Reilly, Spry, etc announce "Internet in a box" product to bring the Web into homes.
March: Marc Andreessen and colleagues leave NCSA to form "Mosaic Communications Corp" (later Netscape).
May 25-27: First International WWW Conference, CERN, Geneva. Heavily oversubscribed (800 apply, 400 allowed in): the "Woodstock of the Web". VRML is conceived here. TBL's closing keynote hints at upcoming organization. (Some of Tim's slides on Semantic Web)
June: M. Bangemann report on European Commission Information Superhighway plan. Over 1500 registered servers.Load on the first Web server (info.cern.ch) 1000 times what it has been 3 years earlier.
July: MIT/CERN agreement to start W3 Organisation is announced by Bangemann in Boston. MIT press release. Reports in Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe etc.
August: Founding of the IW3C2: the International WWW Conference Committee, in Boston, by NCSA and CERN.
September: The European Commission and CERN propose the WebCore project for development of the Web core technology in Europe.
1 October: World Wide Web Consortium founded.
October: Second International WWW Conference: "Mosaic and the Web", Chicago. Also heavily oversubscribed: 2000 apply, 1300 allowed in.
14 December: First W3 Consortium Meeting at M.I.T. in Cambridge (USA).
15 December: First meeting with European Industry and the European Consortium branch, at the European Commission, Brussels.
16 December: CERN Council approves unanimously the construction of the LHC (Large Hadron Collider) accelerator, CERN's next machine and competitor to the US' already defunct SSC (Superconducting Supercollider). Stringent budget conditions are however imposed. CERN thus decides not to continue WWW development, and in concertation with the European Commission and INRIA (the Institut National pour la Recherche en Informatique et Automatique, FR) transfers the WebCore project to INRIA.

1995

February: the Web is the main reason for the theme of the G7 meeting hosted by the European Commission in the European Parliament buildings in Brussels (BE).
March: CERN holds a two-day seminar for the European Media (press, radio, TV), attended by 250 reporters, to show WWW. It is demonstrated on 60 machines, with 30 pupils from the local International High School helping the reporters "surf the Web".
April: Third International WWW Conference: "Tools and Applications", hosted by the Fraunhofer Gesellschaft, in Darmstadt (DE)
June: Founding of the Web Society in Graz (AT), by the Technical University of Graz (home of Hyper-G), CERN, the University of Minnesota (home of Gopher) and INRIA.

A Little History of the World Wide Web

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UnknownNovember 19, 2018 at 9:58 PM
Thanks for sharing such a great article with us. This surely helps me in my work.Thanks a lot app development in USA
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