Sliced bread. It’s the result of a marriage of two independently great inventions: the knife, and the loaf of bread. But today we take for granted the fact that sliced bread wasn’t always, well, sliced. Much like we can take for granted when someone starts talking about the World Wide Web, they’re not really talking about the Internet. However, like sliced bread the World Wide Web is the result of an equally important marriage, the marriage between the Internet and a hypertext system created by Tim Berners-Lee. The idea? “Suppose all the information stored on computers everywhere were linked” (Berners-Lee and Fischetti 4). “Suppose I could program my computer to create a space in which anything could be linked to anything” (4). These ideas were the concepts that formed the basis for the revolutionary breakthrough that came to be called the World Wide Web.
It wasn’t always this way and although the concept was very clear in its creator’s mind, it was ten years from the time that Tim Berners-Lee first began work on a program called ENQUIRE to the time the very first web page was made available. Then it would be another four years before the World Wide Web would truly begin to take off. In 1980, Berners-Lee had taken a contract job at CERN, a European particle physics laboratory in Geneva, and ENQUIRE was his first attempt at linking pages of hypertext together (Berners-Lee and Fischetti 4). Hypertext, as Berners-Lee described it, “was nonsequential text, in which a reader was not constrained to read in any particular order, but could follow links and delve into the original document from a short quotation” (5). Of course when you think of the World Wide Web today and how all of its millions of pages are linked together, this original line of thinking still provides the basis for how it all works. Unfortunately when his contract time at CERN was finished, because of the proprietary operating system that his program was written to run on, Berners-Lee left CERN without taking the ENQUIRE source code with him. On his way out the door, he handed the floppy disk to a systems manager and those who saw it after that “thought it was a nice idea” (11), but eventually it would be lost and not be used in its present form again (11).
As mentioned earlier, the World Wide Web is the result of the marriage of two independently great inventions, and the technology behind one of those two inventions, the Internet, had already been up and running since the 1970s (Berners-Lee and Fischetti 18). The Internet is often mistakenly the term used when discussing the World Wide Web but unlike the network of documents that are linked together to form the Web, the Internet is the network of computers that are interconnected to form the backbone on which the World Wide Web resides. It was the eventual marriage of this network backbone and Berners-Lee’s hypertext system that would allow his project to scale into the global system that he envisioned it to be (19). At this point, Berners-Lee was back working another contract at CERN and was ready to take his hypertext system to the next level. In March of 1989, he had written a project proposal called “’Information Management: A Proposal’ . . . [which was] circulated for comments at CERN” (Connolly) but nothing happened. He would then repeat this process again in 1990, “and again it got shelved” (Berners-Lee and Fischetti 22). What he didn’t realize at the time was his idea had actually garnered the attention that he so desperately wanted. During a later conversation with Mike Sendall, his boss, about buying a new personal computer, Berners-Lee would hear the exact words that he had been waiting so long to hear (22-23): “Once you get the machine, why not try programming your hypertext thing on it?” (23). After hearing what Sendall had just uttered to him, Berners-Lee immediately began thinking about what he would name his new project (23).
Early ideas such as Information Mesh, Mine of Information, and The Information Mine weren’t quite what he was searching for (Berners-Lee and Fischetti 23). These names “didn’t encompass the idea of something global, or of hypertext, and represented only getting information out – not putting it in” (23). “Then another name came up as a simple way of representing global hypertext” (23). It was a name commonly used in mathematics to “denote a collection of nodes and links in which any node can be linked to any other” (23). It was a perfect name to describe the nature of how his system would link together people and computers on a global level. His name for the system, despite its nine syllable long acronym, would be the World Wide Web (23). Over the next four years the events that would unfold surrounding Berners-Lee’s World Wide Web would end up being the start of a global revolution. After a limited release of the program to fellow CERN people who also had computers capable of writing hypertext and accessing the web, Berners-Lee would prepare his system to be promoted at the Hypertext ’91 conference (45, 50). By the same time only two years later, on the same wall that displayed the lone reference to the World Wide Web in 1991, every project display would now “have something to do with the Web” (51).
By 1992 logs showing the number of daily hits to the world’s first web server, info.cern.ch, “was a dramatic exponential, doubling every three to four months. After one year, the load had grown by a factor of ten” (66). In 1993, the number of web servers had increased to about fifty and there was increasing competition among browsers, the “graphical point-and-click” (56) software programs that would display the HTML and graphics contained on a web page (67). One of those browsers, created by University of Illinois student Marc Andreessen and called Mosaic when it was released to the public in February of 1993, would later provide the foundation for a company by the name of Netscape® whose current browser, Netscape Navigator®, remains in use to this day (68-69, 82).
The true turning point for Berners-Lee’s World Wide Web would be on April 30, 1993, when he received a signed and stamped declaration from CERN stating that “CERN agreed to allow anybody to use the Web protocol and code free of charge, to create a server or a browser, to give it away or sell it, without any royalty or other constraint” (Berners-Lee and Fischetti 74). Now with its origin clearly etched in the pages of history, you can best find out what happened next by a quick search on the World Wide Web, “a space in which anything could be linked to anything” (4). You could even start by pointing your browser to info.cern.ch, the domain that’s still pointing to the web site of the world’s first web server.
Works Cited
Berners-Lee, Tim and Mark Fischetti. Weaving The Web: The Original Design and Ultimate Destiny of the World Wide Web. 1st ed. New York: HarperCollins, 2000.
Connolly, Dan. A Little History of the World Wide Web. 2000. Oct. 2, 2007 <http://www.w3.org/History.html>.
This Original Work is Copyright © 2007 Cory Tomlinson and Server Side Studios All Rights Reserved
