© Mark Ollig
The internet, our foundational digital network, is similar to the paved highways connecting various destinations.
The web is an application that runs on top of the internet, much like the cars that travel over our highways.
The web operates on top of the internet’s underlying infrastructure using a separate layer of software and protocols (the overlay structure and operability) to enable website interactions.
British computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee presented “Information Management: A Proposal,” March 12, 1989, a recommendation for a distributed hypertext system to his colleagues at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN, in Geneva, Switzerland.
Tim Berners-Lee did not conceive the idea of hypertext; earlier ideas and developments influenced his work.
In 1945, Vannevar Bush, an American engineer who led the US Office of Scientific Research and Development during World War II, said, “Consider a future device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility.”
“As We May Think,” an essay Bush wrote and published in July 1945 in The Atlantic Monthly magazine, describes a personalized information system, an electromechanical device called “Memex” that stores and links information; at that time, the technology was not yet available to build it.
Although never constructed, Memex, a theoretical concept, influenced the development of hypertext and personal computing.
In 1960, Nelson began Project Xanadu to develop a user-friendly way for cross-referencing documents electronically with computers; however, due to technical and coordinating issues, it was never built.
In 1965, Nelson coined the terms “hypertext” and “hypermedia,” as methods for instantly interconnecting reading documents via active links. Hypertexting links words, images, and concepts to related information. For example, while reading a website about coffee, you can click a link to see a map of where beans come from or learn how espresso is made.
During the 1960s, Douglas Engelbart developed the oN-Line System (NLS), which used hypertext-like linking computer coding and introduced graphical computing elements that influenced the development of graphical user interfaces by Xerox and Apple.
“When I first began tinkering with a software program that eventually gave rise to the idea of the World Wide Web, I named it Enquire, short for “Enquire Within Upon Everything,” a musty old book of Victorian advice I noticed as a child in my parents’ house outside London,” Tim Berners-Lee wrote on the first of 226 pages in his book “Weaving the Web” from 1999, which I own.
Berners-Lee said the title, “Enquire Within Upon Everything,” was suggestive of magic, and that the book was a portal to a world of information.
“In 1980, I wrote a program, Enquire, for tracking software in the PS [Proton Synchrotron] control system. It stored snippets of information and linked related pieces. To find information, one progressed via links from one sheet to another,” Berners-Lee said.
During his March 12, 1989, presentation, Berners-Lee diagrammed a flowchart showing CERN network users distributing, accessing, and collaborating on electronic files. Electronic documents would be viewed and modified regardless of the computer model or operating system.
He proposed a generic client user-friendly interface, a “browser” software for a computer user to interact with hypertext data servers.
Berners-Lee compared hypertext to a phone directory, with links connecting information about people, places, and categories using a system where users could access a single database via a distributed file system.
He developed the protocols for linking databases and storing documents across a network.
Tim Berners-Lee and his colleague Robert Cailliau, a Belgian informatics engineer who in 1987 proposed a hypertext system for CERN, collaborated to introduce the phrase “WorldWideWeb” Nov. 12, 1990.
A basic form of the WorldWideWeb software was operating at CERN by Dec. 25, 1990.
Berners-Lee wrote the initial code for Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), and the first web browser, which he called “WorldWideWeb,” as a tool for sharing information at CERN. He used a NeXTcube computer workstation.
During 1989 to 1991, he designed the World Wide Web, creating HTTP, URL, and HTML coding technologies to allow linked document sharing over the internet.
Public computer users outside CERN could use Berner-Lee’s WorldWideWeb hypertext software over the internet starting Aug. 6, 1991.
In 1993, the internet primarily connected universities, private companies, and government computers.
In late 1992, the Mosaic web browser was being developed at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina are often credited as the lead developers and driving forces behind it.
The NCSA Mosaic, version 1.0, could be freely downloaded from the NCSA website April 22, 1993.
I remember using NCSA Mosaic on my HP OmniBook 300 laptop computer. Mosaic featured icons, bookmarks, pictures, and a friendly user interface integrating multimedia with text and graphics.
The web, an overlaying program on the internet, operates in harmony with the internet protocols created by Vint Cerf and Robert Kahn.
Tim Berners-Lee’s first hypertext website can be seen at https://bit.ly/48AtVXt.
Today, we are witnessing the World Wide Web evolving. Its threads between information, social media, business, government, and e-commerce sites are rapidly merging with artificial intelligence, so hang on, folks!
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| A snapshot of the 1993 NCSA Mosaic web browser in use. (Photo Public Domain, by Charles Severance) |
