Origins
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The underlying ideas of the Web can be traced as far back as 1980,
when Tim Berners-Lee built ENQUIRE (referring to Enquire Within Upon
Everything, a book he recalled from his youth). While it was rather
different from the Web we use today, it contained many of the same
core ideas (and even some of the ideas of Berners-Lee's next project
after the WWW, the Semantic Web).
In March 1989, Tim Berners-Lee wrote Information Management: A
Proposal, which referenced ENQUIRE and described a more elaborate
information management system. With help from Robert Cailliau, he
published a more formal proposal for the World Wide Web on November
12, 1990. He began implementing those ideas immediately, on a
recently acquired NeXT workstation. |
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.
On August 6, 1991, he posted a short summary of the World Wide Web
project on the alt.hypertext newsgroup. This date also marked the
debut of the Web as a publicly available service on the Internet.
The crucial underlying concept of hypertext originated with older
projects from the 1960s, such as Ted Nelson's Project Xanadu and
Douglas Engelbart's oN-Line System (NLS). Both Nelson and Engelbart
were in turn inspired by Vannevar Bush's microfilm-based "memex,"
which was described in the 1945 essay "As We May Think".
Berners-Lee's breakthrough was to marry hypertext to the Internet.
In his book Weaving The Web, he explains that he had repeatedly
suggested that a marriage between the two technologies was possible
to members of both technical communities, but when no one took up
his invitation, he finally tackled the project himself. In the
process, he developed a system of globally unique identifiers for
resources on the Web and elsewhere: the Uniform Resource Identifier.
The World Wide Web had a number of differences from other hypertext
systems that were then available.
The WWW required only unidirectional links rather than bidirectional
ones. This made it possible for someone to link to another resource
without action by the owner of that resource. It also significantly
reduced the difficulty of implementing Web servers and browsers (in
comparison to earlier systems), but in turn presented the chronic
problem of broken links.
Unlike certain applications, such as HyperCard, the World Wide Web
was non-proprietary, making it possible to develop servers and
clients independently and to add extensions without licensing
restrictions.
On April 30, 1993, CERN announced that the World Wide Web would be
free to anyone, with no fees due.
The World Wide Web finally gained critical mass with the 1993
release of the graphical Mosaic web browser by the National Center
for Supercomputing Applications developed by Marc Andreessen. Prior
to the release of Mosaic, the Web was text based and its popularity
was less than older protocols in use over the Internet, such as
Gopher protocol and Wide area information server. Mosaic's graphical
user interface allowed the Web to become by far the most popular
Internet protocol. |
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