invention of www

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Invention of Web

The history of every great invention is based on a lot of pre-history. In the case of the World-Wide Web, there are two lines to be traced: the development of hypertext, or the computer-aided reading of electronic documents, and the development of the Internet protocols which made the global network possible.

As early as 1945 Vannevar Bush, science adviser to President Roosevelt, writes about the Memex, a device (based on microfilm) for storing vast amounts of documents in a single desk, with mechanical aids for finding, organising and adding to the repository. Note: the Vannevar Bush symposium was held on 12 October on the 50th anniversary of the publication of his article in the Atlantic Monthly.

196x Douglas Engelbart produces first hypertext system. These systems run on the expensive and enormous machines of the sixties, with even more expensive display systems. Engelbart is also the inventor of the mouse.

1968

Ted Nelson coins the term "Hypertext".

1972

DARPA starts research leading to the Internet. Originally conceived to connect research centres for data exchange, it is later adopted for military purposes. Its main characteristic is the automatic routing of information packets, circumventing the problem of network vulnerability through failure of single transmission nodes.

1975

Alan Kay produces the first personal computer (Xerox PARC). Many ideas had been tried, Kay invented overlapping window technology to produce a single-user personal machine driven by menu commands accessed by a mouse. This is used in many workstations in the beginning of the 80's and was popularised in the Apple Macintosh of 1984.

1979

Charles Goldfarb invents SGML. This idea separates content structure from presentation. Thus the same document can be rendered in different ways. HTML, the markup language of the Web, is an SGML application.

1981

"Literary Machines" (Ted Nelson) describes project Xanadu: a networked, world-wide system for publication, including collection of royalties and inclusion of existing material.

1987

CERN and the US laboratories connect to the Internet as the main means of exchanging data beween the laboratories.

1989

The HEP community is small but spread all over the world. The physics research laboratories of the world have many collaborations, and the exchange of data and documents is a primordial activity. This environment is naturally ready to accept a system that facilitates such communication over networks. The adoption of the Internet as the standard academic network by CERN and its fellow laboratories in the US made the ground very fertile indeed.

Late in the year 1989, Tim Berners-Lee proposes a networked Hypertext system for CERN. Robert Cailliau independently proposes a hypertext project for documentation handling inside the laboratory.

1990

CERN: A Joint proposal for a hypertext system is presented to the management.

Mike Sendall buys a NeXT cube for evaluation, and gives it to Tim. Tim's prototype implementation on NeXTStep is made in the space of a few months, thanks to the qualities of the NeXTStep software development system. This prototype offers WYSIWYG browsing/authoring! Current Web browsers used in "surfing the Internet" are mere passive windows, depriving the user of the possibility to contribute.

During some sessions in the CERN cafeteria, Tim and I try to find a catching name for the system. I was determined that the name should not yet again be taken from Greek mythology. Tim proposes "World-Wide Web". I like this very much, except that it is difficult to pronounce in French...

1991
The prototype is very impressive, but the NeXTStep system is not widely spread. A simplified, stripped-down version (with no editing facilities) that can be easily adapted to any computer is constructed: the Portable "Line-Mode Browser".

SLAC, the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center in California, becomes the first Web server in USA. It serves the contents of an existing, large data base of abstracts of physics papers.

Distribution of software over the Internet starts.

The Hypertext'91 conference (San Antonio) allows us a "poster" presentation (but does not see any use of discussing large, networked hypertext systems...).

1992

The portable browser is released by CERN as freeware.

Many HEP laboratories now join with servers: DESY (Hamburg), NIKHEF (Amsterdam), FNAL (Chicago).

Interest in the Internet population picks up. The Gopher system from the University of Minnesota, also networked, simpler to install, but with no hypertext links, spreads rapidly.

We need to make a Web browser for the X system, but have no in-house expertise. However, Viola (O'Reilly Assoc., California) and Midas (SLAC) are wysiwyg implementations that create great interest. The world has 50 Web servers!

1993

Viola and Midas are shown at the Software Development Group of NCSA (the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, Illinois). Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina write Mosaic from NCSA. This is easy to install, robust, and allows in-line colour images. This causes an explosion in the USA.

I regret the loss of a number of features from the original prototype, which were not implemented in any of the browsers that followed from the Line Mode Browser and the X implementations such as Viola and Mosaic. The absence of wysiwyg editing of Web pages is particularly frustrating. I begin to search for and find SGML technology: one day I force a meeting with the president of a small but highly advanced company, Grif. During lunch I present my vision of what the Web will do to the Internet and business publishing. It takes some time to make get the points across: Europe is not ready for this revolution! However, Grif now is a member of the consortium and has a suite of Web publishing products (Symposia).

CERN produces Web server software with basic protection mechanisms.

The Web server with pictures from the Dinosaur Exhibition in Honolulu is the showcase server for the Web. The European Commission approves the first WWW based project: "Wise", for dissemination of information to small and medium enterprises (DGXIII, the Fraunhofer Gesellschaft (Darmstadt/Rostock) the CCG (Portugal) and CERN).

I conceive and start organizing the First International WWW Conference. We have 250 servers!

1994

Jim Clark, during a period of reflection, is advised to look into the Internet. He founds MCC (later Netscape). Netscape wisely hires the best young Web programmers of the world.

The First International WWW Conference is held in Geneva, at CERN. It attracts over 600 Web enthusiasts, only 400 of which can be admitted ("Woodstock of the Web").

A conference in the US is a necessity, we found the IW3C2 (International WWW Conference Committee) to run the future conferences.

The success of the Web means that CERN as a physics lab cannot continue to invest effort in an informatics project without help. We propose the WebCore project to the European Commission, to obtain funding for continued development of the core technology.

The Second WWW Conference is appropriately organized by NCSA, in Chicago. It attracts 1800 people, of which only 1300 can be admitted.

Tim Berners-Lee and the Laboratory for Computer Science (LCS) of MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) start the W3C Consortium in the US. It is modelled after the X consortium.

Tim Berners-Lee leaves CERN for MIT (December).

The CERN Council approves unanimously the construction of the LHC accelerator. This Large Hadron Collider will be built in the existing LEP tunnel, but with a tight budget. It is now impossible for CERN to continue deep involvement in the Web technological development. We have 2500 servers.

1995

In January, CERN and the European Commission invite INRIA, the Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique, to continue the European involvement. INRIA has five sites in France and is heavily involved in European projects and collaborations with similar institutes in Europe and the world.

Sun Microsystems produces HotJava, a browser which incorporates interactive objects.

The Third Conference is organised by the FhG, Darmstadt. There is no way for individuals to become members of the Web Consortium. To give individuals a voice, a user-group type organisation is needed. This leads to the founding of the Web Society in Graz (Austria).

Regional conferences are being organised (Portugal, Sydney, ... ). At one point we register 700 new servers per day!

During the summer, several big European companies, mainly users, join the W3C. The European presence in the world-spanning Web Consortium is now large enough to organise a special day devoted to the Consortium activities in Europe. This meeting is attended by 1300 people and held in Paris (organised by INRIA).

The Fourth Conference will be held in December, organised by MIT, Boston. The Fifth Conference is being oganised by INRIA to take place in May 1996, in Paris. There are to date approximately 73'500 servers. WWW is generally equated with the Internet.

The following individuals, organizations, and events played key roles in the creation of the web:

Ted Nelson - Discovered the key concept underlying the web, the idea of linked hypertext.
Douglas Engelbart - Developed the first working hypertext system in 1968. Also invented the graphical user interface and the computer mouse.
CERN - The European Particle Physics Laboratory where Tim Berners-Lee developed the concepts of the web, and developed the first web server, browser, and editor.
Stanford Linear Accelerator Center - The first web site in North America, developer of the Midas web browser, and helped establish the first web site in China.
Mosaic - The first popular web browser, developed at the National Center for Super Computing Applications in 1993 by a team led by Marc Andreessen.
Netscape - In 1994, Andreessen and most of the Mosaic team left the NCSA to join the company Netscape with Jim Clark, where they began releasing a commercial grade browser called Navigator for free on the net.
Online Service Rush - The major online computer services provided access to the web in 1995, quickly making it a household word, and spreading its use to millions of new users.
W3 Consortium - The organization that defines the web's technical standards, led by Tim Berners-Lee.
Browser History - A chronological history of the development of web browsers over the years.

Ted Nelson

Ted Nelson discovered the concept of hypertext, influencing several developers of the net, most notably Tim Berners-Lee.

ACM incorporates a principle similar to one Ted Nelson called "transcopyright". ACM will hold its copyrighted works on its servers and will give free and unlimited permission to create and copy links to those works or their components. So that readers can locate the context from which an excerpt was drawn, ACM will provide a way of linking a component to its parent work. Readers following links may browse abstracts of the work, but for full access to the work may be asked to pay a fee or present a valid authorization certificate to ACM or ACM's agent.

Ted Nelson went to Swarthmore College in the late 1950's, and then to graduate school at the University of Chicago in 1959, and Harvard University in 1960. He took a course in computer programming at Harvard using an IBM 7090 computer, and began to think about writing a document management system to index and organize his collection of notes.

As he considered the design of this system, Nelson applied his experience as a filmmaker with the conception of complex motion picture effects, moving from one shot to another, and conceived of the idea of hypertext. He became profoundly convinced of the enormous value of such a system, and has been thinking and talking about it ever since.

Nelson's first job was as a photographer and film editor at a Miami laboratory where John Lilly was carrying out research on the intelligence of dolphins, using LINC microcomputers to analyze their talking, as fascinated by acoustics as J.C.R. Licklider. Nelson then moved to a job teaching sociology at Vassar College.

The word "hypertext" was first coined by Nelson in 1963, and is first found in print in a college newspaper article about a lecture he gave called "Computers, Creativity, and the Nature of the Written Word" in January, 1965.

Nelson later popularized the hypertext concept in his book Literary Machines. His vision involved implementation of a "docuverse", where all data was stored once, there were no deletions, and all information was accessible by a link from anywhere else. Navigation through the information would be non-linear, depending on each individual's choice of links. This was more than text -- it was hypertext. The web realizes part of this vision, except that there are deletions, and some information is stored in more than one place.

Nelson has continued to develop his theory, and instantiates it with Project Xanadu, a high-performance hypertext system that assures the identity of references to objects, and solves the problems of configuration management and copyright control. Anyone is allowed to reference anything, provided that references are delivered from the original, and possibly involving micropayments to the copyright holders.

For example, the Xanadu system would enable an artist to post their work in electronic form and let it be accessed any number of times, without having to worry about suddenly receiving an insupportable bill for network bandwidth costs. By adding useful structure, the system frees up the information and makes it available to everyone.

Douglas Engelbart

Douglas Engelbart developed the mouse, the graphical user interface, and the first working hypertext system. Also, his NLS computer system was the second node connected to the ARPANET.

At the end of World War Two, Douglas Engelbart was a 20 year old US Navy radar technician in the Philippines. One day in a Red Cross library, he picked up a copy of the Atlantic Monthly from July, 1945, read Vannevar Bush's article about his vision for the "memex" automated library system, and was profoundly influenced.

Sixteen years later Engelbart published his own vision of Bush's ideas, describing an advanced electronic information system in the paper "Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework", prepared for the Air Force Office Of Scientific Research, and extracted below:

"Most of the structuring forms I'll show you stem from the simple capability of being able to establish arbitrary linkages between different substructures, and of directing the computer subsequently to display a set of linked substructures with any relative positioning we might designate among the different substructures.

You can designate as many different kinds of links as you wish, so that you can specify different display or manipulative treatment for the different types."

Engelbart joined the Stanford Research Institute and in 1962 started work on Augment, a project to develop computer tools to augment human capabilities. As part of this effort, he developed a computer system called NLS (oN-Line System), to cross-reference research papers for sharing among geographically distributed researchers. NLS provided groupware capabilities, screen sharing among remote users, and reference links for moving between sentences within a research paper and from one research paper to another.

Engelbart had a vision of an interface between man and machine providing instant connection and communication. Partly in fulfillment of that dream, he invented the first graphical user interface and computer mouse,

Engelbart demonstrated NLS at the Fall Joint Computer Conference in 1968 in a presentation to several thousand conference participants. He demonstrated the mouse, the first working form of hypertext, and a form of video teleconferencing. A film of the event was made, and the audience can be seen giving the talk a standing ovation. NLS was subsequently commercially distributed as the "Augment" application by McDonnell Douglas.

In tribute to his work, Engelbart's NLS system was chosen as the second node on the ARPANET, giving him a role in the invention of the Internet as well as the Web.

CERN

Tim Berners-Lee led the development of the web with the help of Robert Cailliau and others while at the venerable nuclear physics laboratory Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucleaire (CERN).

Berners-Lee : Tim Berners-Lee's mother and father were both mathematicians who were part of the team that programmed Manchester University's Mark I, the world's first commercial, stored program computer, sold by Feranti Ltd. One day when he was in high school Berners-Lee found his dad writing a speech on computers for Basil de Ferranti. Father and son talked about how the human brain has a unique advantage over computers, since it can connect concepts that aren't already associated. For example, if you are walking and see a nice tree, you might think about how cool the park is under the trees, and then think of your backyard, and then decide to plant a tree for shade behind your house. Young Berners-Lee was left with a powerful impression of the potential for computers to be able to link any two pieces of previously unrelated information.

Berners-Lee graduated from Queen's College at Oxford University in 1976 with a degree in physics. He then worked for two years as a software engineer with Plessey Telecommunications on distributed systems, message relays, and bar coding. He then joined D.G. Nash, where he developed a multi-tasking operating system, and typesetting software for intelligent printers.

CERN : In 1980, Berners-Lee first started work as a consultant at CERN, originally called the Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucleaire, and now the European Particle Physics Laboratory, but still called CERN for old time's sake. The organization consists of many facilities located in a beautiful area in the Jura mountains on the border between France and Switzerland. It was because CERN was so large and complex, with thousands of researchers and hundreds of systems, that Berners-Lee developed his first hypertext system to keep track of who worked on which project, what software was associated with which program, and which software ran on which computers. Like the development of packet switching, hyperlinks are an idea that seems to have wanted to be discovered, with Berners-Lee independently developing his ideas within a few years of Ted Nelson and Douglas Engelbart.

Berners-Lee named his first hypertext system Enquire, after an old book he found as a child in his parents house called Enquire Within upon Everything which provided a range of household tips and advice. The book fascinated young Tim with the suggestion that it magically contained the answer to any problem in the world. With the building of the Enquire system in 1980, and then the Web ten years later, Berners-Lee has pretty much successfully dedicated his life to making that childhood book real.

From 1981 to 1984, Berners-Lee left CERN and worked at Image Computer Systems as Technical Design Lead, with responsibility for real-time, graphics, and communications software for an innovative software program that enabled older dot-matrix printers to print a wide range of advanced graphics. He then rejoined CERN full-time in 1984, and almost immediately started trying to get a hypertext project approved for official funding. In March, 1989, he completed a project proposal for a system to communicate information among researchers in the CERN High Energy Physics department, intended to help those having problems sharing information across a wide range of different networks, computers, and countries. The project had two main goals:

Open design - Like Kahn's design for TCP/IP, the hypertext system should have an open architecture, and be able to run on any computer being used at CERN including Unix, VMS, Macintosh, NextStep, and Windows.

Network distribution - The system should be distributed over a communications network. However, Berners-Lee thought that there might be an intermediary period when most of the research material was carried on individual CDROM's, which never became necessary.
Robert Cailliau. Robert Cailliau, who had independently proposed a project to develop a hypertext system, joined Berners-Lee in his effort to get the web off the ground, rewriting the project proposal and lobbying management for funding. Cailliau would be an invaluable partner with Berners-Lee throughout the development of the web at CERN, collaborating on papers and presentations, rounding up programmers and funding, and helping run the first WWW conference. Cailliau later became President of the International World Wide Web Conference Committee (IW3C2).

Development : In the fall of 1990, Berners-Lee took about a month to develop the first web browser on a NeXT computer, including an integrated editor that could create hypertext documents. He deployed the program on his and Cailliau's computers, and they were both communicating with the world's first web server at info.cern.ch on December 25, 1990.

The first project Berners-Lee and Cailliau tackled was to put the CERN telephone book on the web site, making the project immediately useful and gaining it rapid acceptance. Some CERN staff started keeping one window open on their computer at all times just to access the telephone web page.

Luckily, CERN had been connected to the ARPANET through the EUnet in 1990. In August, 1991, Tim posted a notice on the alt.hypertext newsgroup about where to download their web server and line mode browser, making it available around the world. Web servers started popping up around the globe almost immediately. An official Usenet 8 newsgroup called comp.infosystems.www was soon established to share info.

Berners-Lee then added support for the FTP protocol to the server, making a wide range of existing FTP directories and Usenet newsgroups immediately accessible through a web page. He also added a telnet server on info.cern.ch, making a simple line browser available to anyone with a telnet client. The first public demonstration of the web server was given at the Hypertext 91 conference. Development of this web server, which came to be called CERN httpd, would continue until July, 1996.

In June, 1992, CERN sent Berners-Lee on a three month trip through the United States. First he visited MIT's Laboratory for Computer Science, then went to an IETF conference in Boston, then visited Xerox-Parc in Palo Alto, California. At the end of this trip he visited Ted Nelson, then living on a houseboat in Sausalito. Interestingly, Nelson had experience with film making, Berners-Lee had experience working with lighting and audiovisual equipment in the amateur theater, and Tom Bruce, who developed the first PC web browser called Cello, also worked professionally as a stage manager in the theater. Maybe these Internet techies are all really just artists at heart...

In a fateful decision that significantly helped the web to grow, Berners-Lee managed to get CERN to provide a certification on April 30, 1993, that the web technology and program code was in the public domain so that anyone could use and improve it.

Afterword : In 1994, Berners-Lee joined the Laboratory for Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he currently holds the 3Com Founders Chair, and has served as Director of the W3C Consortium since it was founded. Berners-Lee has also authored a number of web related documents, including those in the HTML and HTTP sections, and several items listed in the references section.
Cailliau became President of the International World Wide Web Conference Committee (IW3C2).

In December, 1993, Berners-Lee and Cailliau shared the ACM Software System Award with Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina of NCSA for their efforts in developing the Web.

Stanford Linear Accelerator Center

The Stanford Linear Accelerator Center was the first web site in North America, and helped establish the first web site in Asia.

Tim Berners-Lee released the first web browser for the NeXT computer at CERN in March, 1991. Two months later, Paul Kunz came to visit CERN from the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) in Stanford, California.

Like CERN, SLAC is a high energy research laboratory. Located on 460 acres a few miles from the Stanford University campus, it's a national laboratory run by the university and funded by the US Department of Energy. The lab's mission is to conduct basic physics research into the atomic structure of matter using x-rays, electrons, and positrons.

Kunz was an instant convert to the web, and since he also used the NeXT computer, he had the skills to use it. When he returned to SLAC in September, he brought a copy of Berners-Lee's web browser and server with him. Working with Terry Hung, they installed the server on the laboratory's IBM Virtual Machine operating system, and the first web server in North America went live on December 12, 1991.

Louise Addis, the head librarian at SLAC, immediately saw the utility of the web for providing access to the wealth of documentation produced by the laboratory. She persuaded George Crane to write a web interface to SPIRES-HEP, a 300,000 record bibliographic database which SLAC made available to the high energy physics community over the Internet. Soon a range of individual departments in the laboratory put up their own home pages. Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory put up a web site not long thereafter, and the web began to spread throughout North America.

During the summer of 1992, Tony Johnson at SLAC developed the third web browser for Unix, called Midas. One of the innovations of Midas was its ability to display postscript documents, which was the preferred online format for physics researchers because it could be printed on most printers, and it printed scientific formulae exactly as they were graphically displayed on paper. Midas was made available on the net, and helped provide another option for people to get onto the web.

The SLAC WWW technical committee holds open meetings a couple of times a month to discuss technical issues related to web services at the center.

SLAC's embrace of the web helped legitimize it in the physics community, and provided it with a base from which it could grow. SLAC also helped establish the first web site in China, at the Institute of High Energy Physics in Beijing.

Mosaic

NCSA Mosaic, an Internet information browser and World Wide Web client. NCSA Mosaic was developed at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign. NCSA Mosaic software is copyrighted by The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois (UI), and ownership remains with the UI.

Jan `97 ,The Software Development Group at NCSA has worked on NCSA Mosaic for nearly four years and we've learned a lot in the process. We are honored that we were able to help bring this technology to the masses and appreciated all the support and feedback we have received in return. However, the time has come for us to concentrate our limited resources in other areas of interest and development on Mosaic is complete.

Mosaic was the first popular Web browser, and greatly helped spread use of the web across the world.

In 1992, Joseph Hardin and Dave Thompson worked at the NCSA (National Center for Supercomputer Applications), a research institute at the University of Illinois. When they heard about Tim Berners-Lee's work, they downloaded the ViolaWWW browser, and then demonstrated the web to NCSA's Software Design Group by connecting to the web server at CERN over the ARPANET. The group was impressed.

Two students from the group, Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina, began work on a version for X-Windows on Unix computers, and released the first version in February, 1993. Bina provided expert coding support. Andreessen provided unprecedented customer support, monitoring the newsgroups continuously to ensure that they knew about and could fix any bugs and make desired enhancements.

A version of Mosaic for the Macintosh was developed by Aleks Totic and released a few months later, making Mosaic the first browser with cross-platform support.

One of the NCSA's missions is to aid scientific research by producing noncommercial software, giving Hardin and Thompson a ready-made vehicle to set up a funded project to develop Mosaic as a free, publicly available browser, managed by Hardin, and with Andreessen as the software lead.

Mosaic built on Berners-Lee's server, and provided support for graphics, sound, and video clips. An early version introduced forms support, enabling many powerful new uses and applications. Innovations with use of bookmarks and history files were added. Mosaic quickly became the most popular web browser, helping accelerate the growth in web usage even more.

In August, 1994, NCSA assigned all commercial rights to Mosaic to Spyglass, Inc.. Spyglass subsequently licensed their technology to several other companies, including Microsoft for use in Internet Explorer.

The NCSA stopped developing Mosaic in January 1997, since Netscape and Microsoft began to bring large development teams to bear on development of their own browsers.

Netscape

Netscape built the first commercial web browser. In May, 1994, Jim Clark, founder of the computer company Silicon Graphics Inc., Marc Andreessen, and others from the Mosaic development team formed a company to develop a commercial web browser. The University of Illinois almost immediately sued. The company announced settlement of the suit at the Comdex conference in the fall of 1994, and, as part of the settlement, agreed to change its name from "Mosaic Communications" to "Netscape".

Netscape had the resources to improve their technology much faster than the NCSA, and the use of Netscape spread rapidly. In October 1994, Netscape released the the first beta version of their browser, Mozilla 0.96b, over the net. On December 15, the final version was released, Mozilla 1.0, the first commercial web browser.

By the end of 1994, the amount of Web traffic on the Internet passed the amount of Telnet traffic for the first time, and became the second largest source of traffic on the NSFNet after FTP. In April 1995, the number of web packets passed the number of FTP packets communicated over the NSFNet.

Netscape quickly provided many powerful new browser features, and conveniently integrated three Internet technologies in one application -- web, email, and newsgroups. Netscape also made a point of ensuring that their browser was designed to run on all three of the major computer types -- Windows, Macintosh, and Unix.

Netscape was made available for free over the web to individuals and non-profit organizations from the beginning, which was key to its rapid adoption. At first, Netscape asked people to pay after using the browser for a trial period. However, as pressure from Microsoft's free Internet Explorer browser mounted, they quickly realized that their profits were going to come from development of web server software, traffic to their home page, and related revenues, and stopped asking users to pay for the browser.

In 1995, Netscape had the third largest ever Initial Product Offering (IPO) on the NASDAQ stock exchange. However, three years later in 1998, under great pressure from Microsoft and their development of Internet Explorer, Netscape was sold to America Online.

In January, 1998, the Netscape Navigator source code was published on its web site for any developer to examine and improve, adding Navigator to the Open Source Software model of software development, where code is freely published so that potentially millions of people can offer improvements

Online Service Rush

The major online services added millions of new users to the web in 1995, quickly making it a household word.

1995 was the breakout year for the Internet, when the connection of the large, online service populations to the Web made it known throughout the world. After a lot of technical and popular press covered use of the Web in university and corporate environments, millions of new home users obtained access to the web when Compuserve, American Online, and Prodigy provided gateways to the net.

This immigration of a user population that was larger than the entire Internet community up to that point had wonderfully positive effects on the vibrancy and growth of the medium, increasing the population, content, pace of technological development, and network bandwidth growth.

However, this sudden influx also brought with it an unprecedented scale to the net, and a democratic, popular voice to what had been a more scientific and engineering domain. This collision of cultures had painful effects that continued for several years in the newsgroups, which in some cases became almost unusable as they became overwhelmed by random and incomprehensible messages from new online users. IRC experienced a similar but lessor effect, since most online service users continued to use their service provider's proprietary online chat services.

This democratization of the web had two significant effects:

Growth : It added millions of new web users, many now accessing the net from their homes, and showing it to their friends and neighbors. This greatly increased general knowledge of the net's capabilities, and further spurred its growth.
Legitimization : It provided financial and establishment endorsement that legitimized the web, and by extension the Internet. Large amounts of capital from a wide variety of sources began to be invested in the net after the online services connected to it, further expanding its growth.

W3 Consortium

The W3 Consortium oversees development of the web technology standards.

Soon after he created the web, Tim Berners-Lee realized that an independent standards making body was needed to ensure universality of functionality across the industry. He tried to get the IETF interested in taking on this role, but there wasn't yet enough consensus. He talked to several people about setting up a body modeled on the successful X Consortium, which managed the popular Unix X-Windows standard. One person he found particularly receptive to this idea was Michael Dertouzos, the head of MIT's Laboratory for Computer Science, who helped him obtain seed funding and establish the W3C.

In 1994, the W3 Consortium was established with support from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique (INRIA) in Europe, DARPA, and the European Commission to oversee development of common web protocols and promote web interoperability.

The W3C established offices at the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science in October, 1994, at INRIA in March, 1995, and then at the Keio University Shonan Fujisawa Campus in Japan in August, 1996. One of the first things that Berners-Lee did when he got to MIT was move the world's first web server, http://info.cern.ch/, to a new home at http://www.w3.org/.

The W3C's first and current Director is the developer of the web, Tim Berners-Lee, its first and current Chairman is Jean-François Abramatic. Professors Nobuo Saito and Tatsuya Hagino are the associate chair and associate director respectively from Japan.

The W3C publishes a sample code implementation to promote each of their standards. All W3C products are available during development to W3C members, and then are available to the general public a month after formal internal release.

Any industry or staff member can raise an issue for consideration. The W3C staff will then put together a briefing package describing the issue, its importance, the market relevance, technical issues, why the W3C should be involved, how it could help, next steps, and how much it would cost. Members would review and comment on the briefing package, and if there was sufficient consensus an activity would be generated to address the issue.

When the W3C was formed, the fee for full membership was set to US$50K annually. Associate memberships were available at US$5K for non-profit organizations, governments, or companies with less than US$50 million in revenues. Netscape joined as a full member on principle, even though it qualified as an associate member since it was a new company without any revenues.

Membership is open to any organization, but not to individuals. However, individuals can subscribe to the W3C's "World Wide Web Journal".

Browser History

A wide range of web browsers have been developed over the years, each of which influenced subsequent browsers and advanced the state of the art.

A chronological listing of the development of the earliest web browsers is provided below:

WorldWideWeb : Tim Berners-Lee wrote the first web browser on a NeXT computer, called WorldWideWeb, finishing the first version on Christmas day, 1990. He released the program to a number of people at CERN in March, 1991, introducing the web to the high energy physics community, and beginning its spread.
libwww : Berners-Lee and a student at CERN named Jean-Francois Groff ported the WorldWideWeb application from the NeXT environment to the more common C language in 1991 and 1992, calling the new browser libwww. Groff later started the first web design company, InfoDesign.ch.
Line-Mode Browser : Nicola Pellow, a math student interning at CERN, wrote a line-mode web browser that would work on any device, even a teletype. In 1991, Nicola and the team ported the browser to a range of computers, from Unix to Microsoft DOS, so that anyone could access the web, at that point consisting primarily of the CERN phone book.
Erwise : After a visit from Robert Cailliau, a group of students at Helsinki University of Technology joined together to write a web browser as a master's project. Since the acronym for their department was called "OTH", they called the browser "erwise", as a joke on the word "otherwise". The final version was released in April, 1992, and included several advanced features, but wasn't developed further after the students graduated and went on to other jobs.
ViolaWWW : Pei Wei, a student at the University of California at Berkeley, released the second browser for Unix, called ViolaWWW, in May, 1992. This browser was built on the powerful interpretive language called Viola that Wei had developed for Unix computers. ViolaWWW had a range of advanced features, including the ability to display graphics and download applets.
Midas : During the summer of 1992, Tony Johnson at SLAC developed a third browser for Unix systems, called Midas, to help distribute information to colleagues about his physics research.
Samba : Robert Cailliau started development of the first web browser for the Macintosh, called Samba. Development was picked up by Nicola Pellow, and the browser was functional by the end of 1992.
Mosaic : Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina from the NCSA released the first version of Mosaic for X-Windows on Unix computers in February, 1993. A version for the Macintosh was developed by Aleks Totic and released a few months later, making Mosaic the first browser with cross-platform support. Mosaic introduced support for sound, video clips, forms support, bookmarks, and history files, and quickly became the most popular non-commercial web browser. In August, 1994, NCSA assigned commercial rights to Mosaic to Spyglass, Inc., which subsequently licensed the technology to several other companies, including Microsoft for use in Internet Explorer. The NCSA stopped developing Mosaic in January 1997.
Arena : In 1993, Dave Raggett at Hewlett-Packard in Bristol, England, developed a browser called Arena, with powerful features for positioning tables and graphics.
Lynx : The University of Kansas had written a hypertext browser independently of the web, called Lynx, used to distribute campus information. A student named Lou Montulli added an Internet interface to the program, and released the web browser Lynx 2.0 in March, 1993. Lynx quickly became the preferred web browser for character mode terminals without graphics, and remains in use today.
Cello : Tom Bruce, cofounder of the Legal Information Institute, realized that most lawyers used Microsoft PC's, and so he developed a web browser for that platform called Cello, finished in the summer of 1993.
Opera : In 1994, the Opera browser was developed by a team of researchers at a telecommunication company called Telenor in Oslo, Norway. The following year, two members of the team -- Jon Stephenson von Tetzchner and Geir Ivarsøy- left Telenor to establish Opera Software to develop the browser commercially. Opera 2.1 was first made available on the net in the summer of 1996.
Internet In A Box : In January, 1994, O'Reilly and Associates announced a product called Internet In A Box which collected all of the software needed to access the web together, so that you only had to install one application, instead of downloading and installing several programs. While not a unique browser in its own right, this product was a breakthrough because it distributed other browsers and made the web a lot more accessible to the home user.
Navipress : In February, 1994, Navisoft released a browser for the PC and Macintosh called Navipress. This was the first browser since Berners-Lee's WorldWideWeb browser that incorporated an editor, so that you could browse and edit content at the same time. Navipress later became AOLPress, and is still available but has not been maintained since 1997 when Microsoft gave rights to their Internet Explorer browser to AOL.
Mozilla : In October, 1994, Netscape released the the first beta version of their browser, Mozilla 0.96b, over the net. On December 15, the final version was released, Mozilla 1.0, making it the first commercial web browser.
Internet Explorer : On August 23rd, 1995, Microsoft released their Windows 95 operating system, including a Web browser called Internet Explorer. By the fall of 1996, Explorer had a third of market share, and passed Netscape to became the leading web browser in 1999.

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