HISTORY OF THE WEB
"It all began when Tim Berners-Lee,
a graduate of Oxford University, got frustrated with the fact that his daily schedule planner, his list of phone numbers, and his documents were stored in different databases on different machines thus making it difficult to access them simultaneously. He set out to fix this problem. The year was 1980, and the place was CERN...'
In March of 1989, Tim Berners-Lee submitted Information Management: A Proposal to his superiors at CERN. In a later paper ("World-Wide Web: An Information Infrastructure for High-Energy Physics"), he mentioned that the motivation for this system arose "from the geographical dispersion of large collaborations, and the fast turnover of fellows, students, and visiting scientists," who had to get "up to speed on projects and leave a lasting contribution before leaving." In his original "Information Management: A Proposal," Berners-Lee described the advantages of a hypertext-based system. The proposal called for "a simple scheme to incorporate several different servers of machine-stored information already available at CERN." A distributed hypertext system was the mechanism to provide "a single user-interface to many large classes of stored information such as reports, notes, data-bases, computer documentation and on-line systems help."
Berners-Lee and others at CERN were impressed with some of the new paradigms(ways) of computing as implemented by NeXT Software, Inc. founded by the one of the architects of the desktop computer revolution Steve Jobs.
The initial world wide web program was developed in November of 1990 using NeXT's object oriented technology. The program was a browser which also allowed WYSIWYG editing of world wide web documents. The first world wide web sever, was also developed and implemented on NEXTSTEP. The software was ported to other platforms in 1991 and released to the public. Berners-Lee and his team at CERN paved the way for the future development of the web by introducing their server and browser, the protocol used for communication between the clients and the server, Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), the language used in composeing web documents, Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML), and the Universal Resource Locator (URL).
Once the WWW concepts and the protocols were placed in the public domain, programmers and software developers around the world began intorducing their own modifications and improvements. Marc Andreesen was one such programmer. Andreesen, a graduate student at the University of Illinois' NCSA (National Center for Supercomputing Applications), led a team of graduate students (including Eric Bina) which, in February of 1993, released the first alpha version of his "Mosaic for X" point-and-click graphical browser for the Web implemented for UNIX. In August of 1993, Andreesen and his fellow programmers released free versions of their Mosaic for Macintosh and Windows operating systems. This was a significant event in the evolution of the world wide web in that, for the first time, a world wide web client, with a relatively consistent and easy to use point-and-click GUI (Graphical User Interface), was implemented on the three of the most popular operating systems available at the time. By September of 1993, world wide web taffic constituted 1% of all traffic on the NSF backbone.
Andreesen left NCSA in December of 1993 . Within four months, however, Andressen and Eric Bina, along with Jim Clark, started "Mosaic Communications Corp" which is now known as Netscape .
Creation of the world wide web by Tim Berners-Lee, followed by release of the Mosaic browser (and the eventual establishment of Netscape Inc.) can arguably be viewed as the two most significant contributing factors to the success and popularity of the web today.
"It all began when Tim Berners-Lee,
a graduate of Oxford University, got frustrated with the fact that his daily schedule planner, his list of phone numbers, and his documents were stored in different databases on different machines thus making it difficult to access them simultaneously. He set out to fix this problem. The year was 1980, and the place was CERN...'
In March of 1989, Tim Berners-Lee submitted Information Management: A Proposal to his superiors at CERN. In a later paper ("World-Wide Web: An Information Infrastructure for High-Energy Physics"), he mentioned that the motivation for this system arose "from the geographical dispersion of large collaborations, and the fast turnover of fellows, students, and visiting scientists," who had to get "up to speed on projects and leave a lasting contribution before leaving." In his original "Information Management: A Proposal," Berners-Lee described the advantages of a hypertext-based system. The proposal called for "a simple scheme to incorporate several different servers of machine-stored information already available at CERN." A distributed hypertext system was the mechanism to provide "a single user-interface to many large classes of stored information such as reports, notes, data-bases, computer documentation and on-line systems help."
Berners-Lee and others at CERN were impressed with some of the new paradigms(ways) of computing as implemented by NeXT Software, Inc. founded by the one of the architects of the desktop computer revolution Steve Jobs.
The initial world wide web program was developed in November of 1990 using NeXT's object oriented technology. The program was a browser which also allowed WYSIWYG editing of world wide web documents. The first world wide web sever, was also developed and implemented on NEXTSTEP. The software was ported to other platforms in 1991 and released to the public. Berners-Lee and his team at CERN paved the way for the future development of the web by introducing their server and browser, the protocol used for communication between the clients and the server, Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), the language used in composeing web documents, Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML), and the Universal Resource Locator (URL).
Once the WWW concepts and the protocols were placed in the public domain, programmers and software developers around the world began intorducing their own modifications and improvements. Marc Andreesen was one such programmer. Andreesen, a graduate student at the University of Illinois' NCSA (National Center for Supercomputing Applications), led a team of graduate students (including Eric Bina) which, in February of 1993, released the first alpha version of his "Mosaic for X" point-and-click graphical browser for the Web implemented for UNIX. In August of 1993, Andreesen and his fellow programmers released free versions of their Mosaic for Macintosh and Windows operating systems. This was a significant event in the evolution of the world wide web in that, for the first time, a world wide web client, with a relatively consistent and easy to use point-and-click GUI (Graphical User Interface), was implemented on the three of the most popular operating systems available at the time. By September of 1993, world wide web taffic constituted 1% of all traffic on the NSF backbone.
Andreesen left NCSA in December of 1993 . Within four months, however, Andressen and Eric Bina, along with Jim Clark, started "Mosaic Communications Corp" which is now known as Netscape .
Creation of the world wide web by Tim Berners-Lee, followed by release of the Mosaic browser (and the eventual establishment of Netscape Inc.) can arguably be viewed as the two most significant contributing factors to the success and popularity of the web today.
