World Wide Web history

By Michael Fraase

Tuesday, 16 January 1996 10:38AM CST

Section: Internet

Tim Berners-Lee, the World Wide Web’s main architect reportedly claims to have come to the notion of hypertext independently of everything that came before. While such a claim is highly suspect, it doesn’t detract from his designing the first online platform-independent hypertext system to gain widespread acceptance. Berners-Lee began work on a personal hypertext tool in the early 1980s. By the late 1980s, Berners-Lee, then at CERN (the European Particle Physics Institute in Geneva, Switzerland), began to explore a hypertext system that would help the world-wide high-energy physics community share information. In March 1989, Berners-Lee offered a proposal for an online hypertext system to meet his community’s needs.

Robert Cailliau collaborated with Berners-Lee to co-author a design specification for the online hypertext system in November 1990. Cailliau and Berners-Lee envisioned their version of hypertext as a networked web of information nodes. Associative links could be established across machine boundaries, and a simple protocol for exchanging hypertext documents was included in the specification (this grew to be HTTP). Hypertext documents would be comprised of a single document protocol (embodied as HTML). Perhaps most importantly, the original design specification called for widely available “browser” programs used to traverse this web of information nodes. By late 1990, Berners-Lee had a prototype up and running on a NeXT and Nicola Pellow had both line-mode and NeXT browsers available by Christmas 1990. In May 1991, the World Wide Web was initially released for use within CERN. By August 1991, CERN announced it was working on a complete tool set.

The World Wide Web was formally announced at the Hypertext ‘91 conference in San Antonio by Berners-Lee in December 1991. In January 1992, the CERN command-line browser was made available by anonymous FTP and by July 1992, the entire CERN tool set was released.

Before going on with the recent history of the World Wide Web, it’s important to take a look at the concepts upon which this framework is based.

Hypertext history

Ted Nelson invented the concept of hypertext and coined the term in the mid-1960s. Nelson attributes the underlying seed of his hypertext concept to Vannevar Bush, or, more specifically, to Bush’s concept of the “memex” proposed in his 1945 Atlantic Monthly ” As We May Think” article. Bush’s memex system would allow “knowledge trails” to be built through research materials. These trails were pathways connected by associative links. Bush’s envisioned memex system would provide a more appropriate way of transmitting and retrieving vast amounts of information. Memex, based on the state-of-the-art technology of the day—microfilm—was basically a publishing vehicle that could hold all written material and allow any user to make “trails” through the information.

Nelson takes pride in the power of words and was very much aware of the “spin” his word for his general concept would have once he named it. He admits looking for a loaded word like Bucky Fuller‘s “dymaxion.”

Douglas C. Engelbart realized straight away that while hypermedia was going to revolutionize our access to information, some sort of framework was needed to structure the capabilities with which we were going to be confronted. His concept of the “augmentation of the human intellect” sprang from those concerns and has provided the framework for not only the budding hypermedia discipline, but most of the personal computer industry as well.

As a radar technician in the Philippines during World War II, Engelbart read Bush’s “As We May Think” piece. Bush’s ideas festered within Engelbart until Engelbart was 25, living in the California of the 1950s, and decided to address in some manner the fact that the most pressing problems facing society were growing faster than the tools we used to solve them. Engelbart envisioned a tool that would give a small work group a better chance at collaboratively solving problems that were becoming ever more complex.

Engelbart fully understood that what was needed was not a new way to expand knowledge, but new ways of discovering where to look for specific answers—answers that were already in cold storage somewhere. He also perceived a great need for better communication tools between the individuals working together on complicated problems. Although Engelbart’s augmentation system and attendant tools remain “in process,” the underlying framework came to him in a flash:

When I first heard about computers, I understood from my radar experience during the war that if these machines can show you information on printouts, they could show that information on a screen. When I saw the connection between a television-like screen, an information processor, and a medium for representing symbols to a person it all tumbled together in about half an hour. I went home and sketched a system in which computers would draw symbols on the screen and I could steer through different information spaces with knobs and levers and look at words and data and graphics in different ways. I imagined ways you could expand it to a theater-like environment where you could sit with colleagues and exchange information on many levels simultaneously. God! Think of how that would let you cut loose in solving problems! [Douglas C. Engelbart, “A Conceptual Framework for the Augmentation of Man’s Intellect,” Vistas in Information Handling, Volume 1, ed. Paul Howerton. (Washington, D.C.: Spartan Books, 1962).]

Engelbart currently heads the Bootstrap Institute.

In the late 1960s, Nelson worked with Andries van Dam and a group of undergraduate students at Brown University to create the Hypertext Editing System, one of the first hypertext systems. The initial project was funded by IBM and was used for the Apollo space missions by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). The system, almost predictably, was not a commercial success and by 1970 Nelson was on to other projects. Andries van Dam and his students went on to create FRESS (an acronym for File Retrieval Editing SyStem) at Brown.

Ted Nelson’s project for more than 35 years is Xanadu, a global information repository and network he refers to as the “magic place of literary memory.” Based on his concept of “universal hypertext,” Xanadu was envisioned to consist of many thousands of nodes throughout the world, some of which would exist as fast-food-franchise-like establishments Nelson referred to as “Silverstands.” Xanadu would allow many thousands of users to have simultaneous access to mountains of information, through which they would be able to create their own knowledge trails and endless document revisions. Xanadu, named after a line in Coleridge‘s unfinished poem, Kubla Khan, was never completed in a form that was palatable to users, but its basic concepts are embodied by the World Wide Web.

Spinning the web

Contrary to common belief, Netscape wasn’t the first Web browser. And it wasn’t Mosaic either. Berkeley’s Pei Wei was the author of Viola, widely acknowledged as the first publicly-available Web browser with a graphical interface. Although an early version of Viola was available in mid-1992, the X Windows version of Viola didn’t appear until January 1993. Another X Windows browser called Midas and the first non-graphical Mac browser from CERN also debuted at about the same time.

In early 1992, Lou Montulli (with help from Charles Rezac and Michael Grobe) of the University of Kansas developed a VT-100 client called Lynx.

Web acceptance by the Internet community at large was, in retrospect, glacially slow in computer time. The University of Minnesota’s Gopher was the “killer app” at the time. Ari Luotonen worked on improving the CERN httpd server from July 1993 to July 1994. In February 1993, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign student Marc Andreessen announced Mosaic for X Windows developed in collaboration with NCSA programmer Eric Bina. Mosaic captured the immediate attention of the net-at-large because it handled not only HTTP but Gopher and FTP as well. In mid-1993, NCSA announced its plans to develop Mac and MS-Windows versions of Mosaic. By fall 1993, Windows Mosaic (written by Chris Williamson and Jon Mittelhauser) and Mac Mosaic (written by Thomas Redman, Kim Stephenson, and Mike McCool made their debuts. Thomas Bruce of Cornell University’s Law School also released the initial version of his Cello browser for MS-Windows at about this time.

In late 1993, NCSA’s Rob McCool released a UNIX httpd server and continued to work closely with Andreessen to tailor the server to the Mosaic browser’s capabilities. The most important of McCool’s additions was the Common Gateway Interface (CGI). McCool based much of his work on that of Tony Sanders of Berkeley Software Design Inc. Michigan State University’s Charles Henrich developed a mechanism to incorporate parsed HTML features on the server. Also in 1993, a Windows NT server was developed by Chris Adie of the University of Edinburgh. In August 1993, Chuck Shotton at the University of Texas Medical School released MacHTTP (now marketed as WebStar by StarNine/Quarterdeck).

HTML also evolved from a series of loosely-based collaborations. Dan Connolly wrote the SGML Document Type Definition for the HTML specification. This helped standardize HTML in a way that enabled all HTML authors to play from the same score card. Hewlett Packard’s Dave Ragget is responsible for the HTML+ extensions that include support for tables, mathematical formulae, and inline image text-wrap.

In late 1993, James Clark—founder of Silicon Graphics—announced he and Marc Andreessen were forming Mosaic Communications Corp. In 1994, the company was renamed to Netscape Communications Corp., bearing the name of its software progeny, currently the most popular browser on UNIX, Mac, and MS-Windows platforms.

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