Sept 23rd, 1997
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The opening of CERN's network to the external Internet was all Tim Berners-Lee, a CERN researcher, needed to try and implement something he had been working on throughout the 80's, his "hypertext ideas." The hypertext concept was created in the early 1960s by Ted Nelson as part of the "Xanadu project." Hypertext allows document creators to insert links and names to point to other relevant items. In March 1989, Berners-Lee introduced a proposal to CERN titled "Information Management: A Proposal: Introduction of linked information systems, non-linear text systems." This proposal introduced the ideas of hypertext, the foundation of the world wide web. Berners-Lee had to recirculate his proposal in May 1990, it was not taking off as he had hoped. It was not until November 1990 that he developed an initial program on his NeXT machine. This program was a WYSIWYG browser and editor, and showed his ideas of using hypertext to display information in a non-linear way. In March 1991, a line-mode browser (www) was released to a limited audience in CERN. The line-mode browser was released by anonymous FTP to the general public in January 1992. The WWW project was setup to facilitate communication between high energy physicists. The first US server was at Stanford Linear Accelerator Laboratory (SLAC), in May 1991. By November 1992, the WWW web project now had a total of 26 servers, including recently added National Center of Super Computing's (NCSA). Browsers begin to pop up everywhere, for all the different computer platforms. April 29th, 1991 release of Finnish "Erwise" GUI client for X. May 1991, Pei Wei's "Viola" GUI browser for X test. In January 1993, a CERN Mac browser is released as alpha. Also now there were around 50 known HTTP servers. February 1993, NCSA released the first alpha version of a browser created by one of their scientist. The scientist Marc Andreessen, the browser Mosaic for X. By September 1993, NCSA released working versions of its Mosaic browser for most common platforms, X, PC/Windows and Macintosh. By October there were now over 200 HTTP servers running. I start browsing around on Linux, a text based browser, over a telnet connection. Download times are slow, 1 meg took almost an hour for me. Also in 1993, InterNIC was created by the National Science Foundation to maintain and provide services for the Internet and the Web. These services included Directory and Database Service by AT&T, Registration services by Network Solutions, and Information Services by General Atomics and CERFNet.
Please write if you wish to comment on these articles. e-mail: Marcus Kazmierczak, marcus@mkaz.com |
