History of World Wide Web
CERN agrees to make all the protocols and code related to the World Wide Web on 30 April in 1993, royalty free, a significant step that would contribute in the rapid expansion of the Web as we know it.
Irony is that CERN initially was not very enthusiastic about Tim Berner’s Lee work on the Web. David Williams, head of CERN’s Computing Dept, sent an email to Lee, stating that his work was not related to CERN’s core activity, and would be a waste of resources.
While Web and the Internet are often used interchangeably, fact is the Web is any other service like email, that is used over the Net. Internet’s history dates back much earlier than the Web’s, and the Web’s development is just a part of it.
Matter of fact much before the Web, there were other applications in the Hypertext space- Memex by Vannevar Bush, IBM’s Generalized Markup Language, and Project Xanadu by Ted Nelson. The last in fact claimed theirs to be an improvement over the Web.
A Logic Named Joe, a 1946 short story by Murray Leinster, was the first to come up with the concept of interconnected computers, there was also E.M.Forster’s 1909 story The Machine Stops, that came up with a similiar concept.
Tim Berners Lee, who was earlier a contractor with CERN, came up with ENQUIRE, basically a personal database, which used hypertext, each page being linked with the other page. He would later join CERN in 1984 as a permanent employee.
CERN had already installed TCP/IP protocols on some of the machines, giving Tim Berners Lee, the infra to create the Web. Encouraged by his boss, Lee began to implement his proposal on a NeXT workstation. This one was the first ever web server.
Lee’s idea found an enthusiastic supporter in Robert Cailliau who had created the first browser for Mac. Together they pitched their proposal of combining Net and Hypertext to the European Conference on Hypertext in Sept 1990, but none of the vendors really showed interest.
By the end of 1990, Tim Berners Lee, had built all the tools necessary for the Web- HTTP, HTML, first Web Browser( named as World Wide Web), CERN httpd( first Web server software) and the first Web pages describing the project itself.
However this could run only on NeXT computers, so Nicola Pellow wrote a generic LineModeBrowser, that cud run on any computer. Bernd Pollerman put the CERN telephone directory on Web, so that any within it cud easily use the application.
August 6, 1991- Tim Berners-Lee, posted a summary of the Web, on the alt.hypertext newsgroup. In September 1991, Paul Kunz of Stanford visited CERN, and was very much impressed by the Web, he bought back the NeXT software to Stanford.
Louise Addis, integrated the NeXT software to VM/CMS OS on Stanford’s Linear Accelerator Center( SLAC)’s IBM Mainframe to display their catalog. This was the first Web server outside of EU and in North America.
CERN however did not show much enthusiasm for Tim Berner’s Lee project stating that it did not fit in with their core, and there was no point allocating resources for it. Lee left CERN and joined MIT in 1992, where he continued his work on HTTP.
The early users of the Web were primarily scientific labs, like SLAC and Fermilab, and by Oct 1993, there were over 500 Web servers all over the world. Dr Fun and Netboy were the first webcomics started on the Web in 1993.
And this was the first picture to be ever published on the Web, Les Horribles Cernettes( The Horrible Cern Girls), basically an all female parody pop group, that was founded by CERN employees, their initials a cheeky tribute to CERN’s LHC.
One of the major issues wast that browsers were available only for NeXT OS, it was somewhat overcome by Erwise and Viola in 1992. Lynx a text only hypertext browser was created by students at University of Kansas , while Cello was the first Windows Browser.
Mosaic launched in 1993, by Marc Andressen’s team at NCSA in University of Illinois in Urbana, was the brower that really popularized the Web. It had actually begun in 1992, at the University, funded by High Performance Computing, a federal research program.
The High Performance Computing Act was promulgated in 1991, introduced by Al Gore. This led to the development of the National Information Infrastructure and funding of National Research and Education Network, which in a way spurred the growth of Web.
The Unix and Mac versions of Mosaic were launched by Andreessen, and one of the main reasons for it’s popularity was it’s support for multimedia, as also the rapid response to bug resolution and introducing new features.
Andressen along with Jim Clark, formed Mosaic Communications in 1994 to develop the browser commercially, and this later became Netscape and also introduced the Netscape Navigator.
The first International WWW Conference was held in 1994 at Geneva by Robert Caillilau, who had developed the original Web specification. Earlier CERN had declared the Web protocols to be royalty free.
Tim Berners Lee founded the WWW Consortium or W3C as is more popularly known, at MIT, supported by DARPA and EU in 1994. This was made up of various companies that were willing to create standards to improve the Web quality.
Robert Callilalu, Jean Francois Abramatic and Tim Berners Lee at the 10th annivrsary of W3C, today when the Web has become a part of our lives, a big thanks to these men, especially Lee, who created the Web and then made it free to all.
Credit: @GabbarSanghi
