Shortened History of the WWW

See the full version here.

by Shahrooz Feizabadi

These chapters present parts of the history of the World Wide Web as well as the history of several ideas and underlying technologies from which the World Wide Web emerged. The history is presented in very abbreviated format because Cory Crandall has taken an axe to it so it would fit on his little web page. Events and technologies of particular significance have been discussed in individual sections, but they don't all appear here. As the World Wide Web, in the most basic sense, is a networked hypertext information delivery mechanism, particular attention is given to the above-mentioned fundamental technologies of hypertext and networking. More recently, with the advent of technologies such as Java, the web has gone through another transformation, which among other things, has provided the ability to deliver applications and distributed objects across the Internet. A section on evolution of Java has therefore been included to provide historical context for this relatively new technology.

1. History of Hypertext

   1. Memex

      The history of hypertext begins in July of 1945. President Roosevelt's science advisor during World War II, Dr. Vannevar Bush, proposes Memex in an article titled As We May Think published in The Atlantic Monthly. In the article, Bush outlines the ideas for a machine that would have the capacity to store textual and graphical information in such a way that any piece of information could be arbitrarily linked to any other piece. In his own words:

      "He -- the user -- can add marginal notes and comments, taking advantage of one possible type of dry photography, and it could even be arranged so that he can do this by a stylus scheme, such as is now employed in the telautograph seen in railroad waiting rooms, just as though he had the physical page before him. All this is conventional, except for the projection forward of present-day mechanisms and gadgetry. It affords an immediate step, however, to associative indexing, the basic idea of which is a provision whereby any item may be caused at will to select immediately and automatically another. This is the essential feature of the memex. The process of tying two items together is the important thing."

   2. Hypertext

      In 1965, Ted Nelson coined the terms "hypertext" and "hypermedia" in a paper to the ACM 20th national conference.[Nielsen , DeBra] In an article published by Literary Machines, Nelson explained:

      "By 'hypertext' mean nonsequential writing - text that branches and allows choice to the reader, best read at an interactive screen."

      The first hypertext-based system was developed in 1967 by a team of researchers led by Dr. Andries van Dam at Brown University. The research was funded by IBM and the first hypertext implementation, Hypertext Editing System, ran on an IBM/360 mainframe. IBM later sold the system to the Houston Manned Spacecraft Center which reportedly used it for the Apollo space program documentation. A year later, in 1968, van Dam developed FRESS, a File Retrieval and Editing System which was an improvement of his original Hypertext Editing System and was used commercially by Philips.

      For further reading see the following links to original page:

      • Xanadu
      • Other Landmarks

2. History of the Net

   1. In The Beginning...

      1858

      The "Atlantic cable" was installed across the ocean with the idea of connecting the communication systems in US and Europe. While this was a great idea, the 1858 implementation of it was only operational for a few days.

      The implementation was attempted again in 1866, and this time with great success. The original Atlantic cable laid in 1866 remained operational for almost 100 years.

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      1957

      In 1957, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik. As a response to the Soviet research efforts, president Dwight D. Eisenhower instructed the Department of Defense to establish the Advanced Research Projects Agency or ARPA. The agency started with great success and launched the first American satellite within 18 months of the agency's conception. Several years later, ARPA was also given the task of developing a reliable communications network, specifically for use by computers. The primary motivation for this was to have a network of decentralized military computers connected in such way that in the case of destruction of one or several nodes in a potential war, the network would still survive with communication lines between remaining nodes.

      In 1962 Dr. J.C.R. Licklider was given the task of leading ARPA's research efforts in improving the use of computer technology in the military. It was due to Dr. Licklider's influence that ARPA's primary research efforts moved from the private sector to the universities around the US. His work paved the way for the creation of ARPANET.

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      Try these links for more history:

      • 1960s
      • 1970s
      • 1980s
      • 1990s

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   2. The Internet Today

      The growth of the Internet today has exploded into the latest craze. It is the newest wave of communication through electronic mail, file transfer, telnet access, transaction applications, and much much more. The most popular part of the Internet is the World Wide Web, where anyone can access hypertext pages with the click of a button. The popularity of the Internet has launched many social and ethical issues.

      Recently, the Internet has been critizied for its uncensored information, but has been praised for its educational value. Although the Internet appears to be very convenient to its users, there are many technical issues surrounding this vast network of computers. Technical issues range from network protocols, which is used to communicate information, to display or markup languages, which is used for displaying information.

      For further reading see the following links to original page: The Internet Today

3. History of the Web

   1. CERN WWW Research

      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.

      Tim Berners-Lee started working at CERN (Centre European pour la Recherche Nucleaire -or- European Laboratory for Particle Physics) as a consultant in 1980. At that time, several platform dependent and proprietary information storage and retrieval methods were being used at CERN. Additionally, several systems such as "CERNET" and "FOCUS" were developed in-house.

   2. Mosaic and Netscape

      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 traffic constituted 1% of all traffic on the NSF backbone.