The
World Wide Web ("
WWW" or simply the "
Web") is a global
information medium which users can read and write via
computers connected to the
Internet. The term is often mistakenly used as a synonym for the Internet itself, but the Web is a service that operates over the Internet, as
e-mail does. The
history of the Internet dates back significantly further than that of the
World Wide Web.
The concept of a home-based global information system goes at least as far back as "
A Logic Named Joe", a 1946 short story by
Murray Leinster, in which computer terminals, called "logics," were in every home. Although the computer system in the story is centralized, the story captures some of the feeling of the ubiquitous information explosion driven by the Web.
[edit]1980–1991: Development of the World Wide Web
"In August, 1984 I wrote a proposal to the SW Group Leader, Les Robertson, for the establishment of a pilot project to install and evaluate TCP/IP protocols on some key non-Unix machines at CERN ... By 1990 CERN had become the largest Internet site in Europe and this fact... positively \in Europe and elsewhere... A key result of all these happenings was that by 1989 CERN's Internet facility was ready to become the medium within which Tim Berners-Lee would create the World Wide Web with a truly visionary idea..."
[3]
He found an enthusiastic collaborator in
Robert Cailliau, who rewrote the proposal (published on November 12, 1990) and sought resources within CERN. Berners-Lee and Cailliau pitched their ideas to the European Conference on Hypertext Technology in September 1990, but found no vendors who could appreciate their vision of marrying hypertext with the Internet.
Tim Berners-Lee's account of the exact locations at CERN where the Web was invented, is
here.
On August 6, 1991,
[5] Berners-Lee posted
a short summary of the World Wide Web project on the alt.hypertext newsgroup. This date also marked the debut of the Web as a publicly available service on the Internet.
The WorldWideWeb (WWW) project aims to allow all links to be made to any information anywhere. [...] The WWW project was started to allow high energy physicists to share data, news, and documentation. We are very interested in spreading the web to other areas, and having gateway servers for other data. Collaborators welcome!" —from Tim Berners-Lee's first message
Paul Kunz from the
Stanford Linear Accelerator Center visited CERN in September 1991, and was captivated by the Web. He brought the NeXT software back to SLAC, where librarian Louise Addis adapted it for the
VM/CMS operating system on the
IBM mainframe as a way to display SLAC’s catalog of online documents;
[4] this was the first web server outside of Europe and the first in North America.
[6] An early
CERN-related contribution to the Web was the parody band
Les Horribles Cernettes, whose promotional image is believed to be among the Web's first five pictures.
[7][edit]1992–1995: Growth of the WWW
In keeping with its birth at
CERN, early adopters of the World Wide Web were primarily university-based scientific departments or physics laboratories such as
Fermilab and
SLAC.
Early websites intermingled links for both the
HTTP web protocol and the then-popular
Gopher protocol, which provided access to content through
hypertext menus presented as a
file system rather than through
HTML files. Early Web users would navigate either by bookmarking popular directory pages, such as Berners-Lee's first site at http://info.cern.ch/, or by consulting updated lists such as the
NCSA "What's New" page. Some sites were also indexed by
WAIS, enabling users to submit full-text searches similar to the capability later provided by
search engines.
Students at the
University of Kansas adapted an existing text-only hypertext browser,
Lynx, to access the web. Lynx was available on Unix and DOS, and some web designers, unimpressed with glossy graphical websites, held that a website not accessible through Lynx wasn’t worth visiting.
[edit]Early browsers
The origins of Mosaic had begun in 1992. In November 1992, the NCSA at the University of Illinois (UIUC) established a website. In December 1992, Andreessen and
Eric Bina, students attending UIUC and working at the NCSA, began work on
Mosaic. They released an X Window browser in February 1993. It gained popularity due to its strong support of integrated
multimedia, and the authors’ rapid response to user bug reports and recommendations for new features.
The first
Microsoft Windows browser was
Cello, written by Thomas R. Bruce for the Legal Information Institute at
Cornell Law School to provide legal information, since more lawyers had more access to Windows than to Unix. Cello was released in June 1993.
[4][edit]Web organization
In May 1994 the
first International WWW Conference, organized by Robert Cailliau,
[11][12] was held at CERN;
[13] the conference has been held every year since. In April 1993 CERN had agreed that anyone could use the Web protocol and code royalty-free; this was in part a reaction to the perturbation caused by the
University of Minnesota announcing that it would begin charging license fees for its implementation of the
Gopher protocol.
By the end of 1994, while the total number of websites was still minute compared to present standards, quite a number of
notable websites were already active, many of whom are the precursors or inspiring examples of today's most popular services.
[edit]1996–1998: Commercialization of the WWW
Main article:
Web marketingBy 1996 it became obvious to most publicly traded companies that a public Web presence was no longer optional.
[citation needed] Though at first people saw mainly
[citation needed] the possibilities of free publishing and instant worldwide information, increasing familiarity with two-way communication over the "Web" led to the possibility of direct Web-based commerce (
e-commerce) and instantaneous group communications worldwide. More
dotcoms, displaying products on hypertext webpages, were added into the Web.
[edit]1999–2001: "Dot-com" boom and bust
Low interest rates in 1998–99 facilitated an increase in start-up companies. Although a number of these new entrepreneurs had realistic plans and administrative ability, most of them lacked these characteristics but were able to sell their ideas to investors because of the novelty of the
dot-com concept.
Historically, the
dot-com boom can be seen as similar to a number of other technology-inspired booms of the past including
railroads in the 1840s, automobiles in the early 20th century, radio in the 1920s, television in the 1940s, transistor electronics in the 1950s, computer time-sharing in the 1960s, and
home computers and
biotechnology in the early 1980s.
In 2001 the bubble burst, and many dot-com startups went out of business after burning through their
venture capital and failing to become
profitable. Many others, however, did survive and thrive in the early 21st century. Many companies which began as online retailers blossomed and became highly profitable. More conventional retailers found online merchandising to be a profitable additional source of revenue. While some online entertainment and news outlets failed when their seed capital ran out, others persisted and eventually became economically self-sufficient. Traditional media outlets (newspaper publishers, broadcasters and cablecasters in particular) also found the Web to be a useful and profitable additional channel for content distribution, and an additional vehicle to generate advertising revenue. The sites that survived and eventually prospered after the bubble burst had two things in common; a sound business plan, and a niche in the marketplace that was, if not unique, particularly well-defined and well-served.
[edit]2002–present: The Web becomes ubiquitous
In the aftermath of the dot-com bubble, telecommunications companies had a great deal of overcapacity as many Internet business clients went bust. That, plus ongoing investment in local cell infrastructure kept connectivity charges low, and helping to make high-speed Internet connectivity more affordable. During this time, a handful of companies found success developing business models that helped make the World Wide Web a more compelling experience. These include airline booking sites,
Google's
search engine and its profitable approach to simplified, keyword-based advertising, as well as
ebay's do-it-yourself auction site and
Amazon.com's online department store.
[edit]Web 2.0
Beginning in 2002, new ideas for sharing and exchanging content ad hoc, such as
Weblogs and
RSS, rapidly gained acceptance on the Web. This new model for information exchange, primarily featuring
DIY user-edited and generated websites, was coined
Web 2.0.
The Web 2.0 boom saw many new service-oriented startups catering to a new, democratized Web. Some believe it will be followed by the full realization of a
Semantic Web.
Tim Berners-Lee originally expressed the vision of the Semantic Web as follows:
[14]I have a dream for the Web [in which computers] become capable of analyzing all the data on the Web – the content, links, and transactions between people and computers. A ‘Semantic Web’, which should make this possible, has yet to emerge, but when it does, the day-to-day mechanisms of trade, bureaucracy and our daily lives will be handled by machines talking to machines. The ‘
intelligent agents’ people have touted for ages will finally materialize.
Predictably, as the World Wide Web became easier to query, attained a higher degree of usability, and shed its esoteric reputation, it gained a sense of organization and unsophistication which opened the floodgates and ushered in a rapid period of popularization. New sites such as
Wikipedia and its
sister projects proved revolutionary in executing the
User edited content concept. In 2005, 3 ex-
PayPal employees formed a video viewing website called
YouTube. Only a year later, YouTube was proven the most quickly popularized website in history, and even started a new concept of user-submitted content in major events, as in the
CNN-YouTube Presidential Debates.
The popularity of YouTube and similar services, combined with the increasing availability and affordability of high-speed connections has made video content far more common on all kinds of websites. Many video-content hosting and creation sites provide an easy means for their videos to be embedded on third party websites without payment or permission.
This combination of more user-created or edited content, and easy means of sharing content, such as via RSS widgets and video embedding, has led to many sites with a typical "Web 2.0" feel. They have articles with embedded video, user-submitted comments below the article, and RSS boxes to the side, listing some of the latest articles from other sites.
Continued extension of the World Wide Web has focused on connecting devices to the Internet, coined
Intelligent Device Management. As Internet connectivity becomes ubiquitous, manufacturers have started to leverage the expanded computing power of their devices to enhance their usability and capability. Through Internet connectivity, manufacturers are now able to interact with the devices they have sold and shipped to their customers, and customers are able to interact with the manufacturer (and other providers) to access new content.
Lending credence to the idea of the ubiquity of the web, Web 2.0 has found a place in the global English lexicon. On June 10, 2009 the
Global Language Monitor declared it to be the one-millionth English word.
[15][edit]See also
[edit]References
- Robert Cailliau, James Gillies, How the Web Was Born: The Story of the World Wide Web, ISBN 978-0-19-286207-5, Oxford University Press (Jan 1, 2000)
- Tim Berners-Lee with Mark Fischetti, Weaving the Web: The Original Design and Ultimate Destiny of the World Wide Web by Its Inventor, ISBN 978-0-06-251586-5, HarperSanFrancisco, 1999
- Tim Berners-Lee with Mark Fischetti, Weaving the Web: The Original Design and Ultimate Destiny of the World Wide Web by Its Inventor, ISBN 978-0-06-251587-X(pbk.), HarperSanFrancisco, 2000
- Andrew Herman, The World Wide Web and Contemporary Cultural Theory : Magic, Metaphor, Power, ISBN 978-0-415-92502-0, Routledge, 1st Edition (June 2000)
- ^ a b c Berners-Lee, Tim. "Frequently asked questions - Start of the web: Influences". World Wide Web Consortium. Retrieved 22 July 2010.
- ^ Berners-Lee, Tim. "Frequently asked questions - Why the //, #, etc?". World Wide Web Consortium. Retrieved 22 July 2010.
- ^ A Short History of Internet Protocols at CERN by Ben Segal. 1995
- ^ a b c d e f Berners-Lee, Tim (ca 1993/1994). "A Brief History of the Web". World Wide Web Consortium. Retrieved 17 August 2010.
- ^ How the web went world wide, Mark Ward, Technology Correspondent, BBC News. Retrieved 24 January, 2011
- ^ Tim Berners-Lee, Weaving the Web, HarperCollins, 2000, p.46
- ^ Heather McCabe (1999-02-09). "Grrl Geeks Rock Out". Wired magazine.
- ^ Mosaic Web Browser History – NCSA, Marc Andreessen, Eric Bina
- ^ NCSA Mosaic – September 10, 1993 Demo
- ^ Vice President Al Gore's ENIAC Anniversary Speech.
- ^ Robert Cailliau (21 July 2010). "A Short History of the Web". NetValley. Retrieved 21 July 2010.
- ^ Tim Berners-Lee. "Frequently asked questions - Robert Cailliau's role". World Wide Web Consortium. Retrieved 22 July 2010.
- ^ "IW3C2 - Past and Future Conferences". International World Wide Web Conferences Steering Committee. 2010-05-02. Retrieved 16 May 2010.
- ^ Berners-Lee, Tim; Fischetti, Mark (1999). Weaving the Web. HarperSanFrancisco. chapter 12. ISBN 9780062515872.
- ^ "'Millionth English Word' declared". NEWS.BBC.co.uk
