A Little History of the World Wide Web
from 1945 to 1995
1945
Vannevar Bush writes an
article in Atlantic
Monthly about a photo-electrical-mechanical device called a Memex, for
memory extension, which could make and follow links between documents on
microfiche
1960s
Doug Engelbart prototypes an "oNLine System" (NLS) which does hypertext
browsing editing, email, and so on. He invents the mouse for this purpose. See
the Bootstrap Institute
library.
Ted Nelson coins the word Hypertext in A File Structure for the
Complex, the Changing, and the Indeterminate. 20th National Conference,
New York, Association for Computing
Machinery, 1965. See also: Literary
Machines, a hypertext
bibliography.
Andy van Dam and others build the Hypertext Editing System and FRESS in
1967.
1980
While consulting for CERN June-December of 1980, Tim Berners-Lee writes a
notebook program, "Enquire-Within-Upon-Everything", which allows links to be
made betwen arbitrary nodes. Each node had a title, a type, and a list of
bidirectional typed links. "ENQUIRE" run on Norsk Data machines under
SINTRAN-III.
1989
- March
- "Information Management: A
Proposal" written by Tim BL and
circulated for comments at CERN (TBL).
Paper "HyperText and CERN" produced as background.
1990
- May
- Same proposal
recirculated
- September
- Mike Sendall, Tim's boss, Oks the purchase of a NeXT cube, and allows
Tim to go ahead and write a global hypertext system.
- October
- Tim starts work on a hypertext GUI browser+editor using the NeXTStep
development environment. He makes up "WorldWideWeb" as a name for the
program. (See the first
browser screenshot) "World Wide Web" as a name for the project (over
Information Mesh, Mine of Information, and Information Mine).
- Project original proposal
reformulated with encouragement from CN and ECP divisional management.
Robert Cailliau (ECP) is co-author of
new version.
- November
- Initial WorldWideWeb program development continues on the NeXT (TBL) . This was a wysiwyg
browser/editor with direct inline creation of links.
- November
- Technical Student Nicola Pellow (CN)
joins and starts work on the line-mode browser. Bernd Pollermann (CN) helps get interface to
CERNVM "FIND" index running. TBL gives a colloquium on hypertext in
general.
- Christmas
- Line mode browser and WorldWideWeb
browser/editor demonstrable. Acces is possible to hypertext files,
CERNVM "FIND", and Internet news articles.
1991
- February
- workplan for the purposes of ECP
division.
- 26 February 1991
- Presentation of the project to the
ECP/PT group.
- March
- Line mode browser (www) released to limited audience on "priam" vax,
rs6000, sun4.
- May
- Workplan produced for
CN/AS group
- 17 May
- Presentation to "C5" Committee.
General release of WWW on central CERN machines.
- 12 June
- CERN Computer Seminar on
WWW.
- August
- Files available on the net by FTP, posted on
alt.hypertext (6, 16, 19th Aug), comp.sys.next (20th), comp.text.sgml
and comp.mail.multi-media (22nd). Jean-Francois Groff joins the project.
- October
- VMS/HELP and WAIS gateways installed. Mailing lists www-interest (now
www-announce) and www-talk@info.cern.ch (see archive)
started. One year status report. Anonymous telnet service started.
- December
- Presented poster and demonstration at Hypertext'91 in San
Antonio, Texas (US). W3 browser installed on VM/CMS. CERN computer newsletter announces W3
to the HEP world.
Dec 12: Paul Kunz installs first Web server outside of Europe, at
SLAC.
1992
- 15 January
- Line mode browser release 1.1 available by anonymous FTP (see news). Presentation to AIHEP'92 at La Londe
(FR).
- 12 February
- Line mode v 1.2 annouced on alt.hypertext, comp.infosystems,
comp.mail.multi-media, cern.sting, comp.archives.admin, and mailing
lists.
- April
- 29th April: Release of Finnish "Erwise" GUI client for X
mentioned in
review by TimBL.
- May
- Pei Wei's "Viola" GUI browser for X test version dated May 15.
(See
review by TimBL)
At CERN, Presentation and demo at JENC3, Innsbruck (AT).
Technical Student Carl Barker (ECP) joins
the project.
- June
- Presentation and demo at HEPVM (Lyon). People at FNAL (Fermi National
Accelerator Laboratory (US)), NIKHEF (Nationaal Instituut voor Kern- en
Hoge Energie Fysika, (NL)), DESY (Deutsches Elektronen Synchrotron,
Hamburg, (DE)) join with WWW servers.
- July
- Distribution of WWW through CernLib, including Viola. WWW library code
ported to DECnet. Report to the Advisory Board on Computing.
- August
- Introduction of CVS for code management at
CERN.
- September
- Plenary session demonstration to the HEP community at CHEP'92 in
Annecy (FR).
November Jump back in time to a snapshot of the WWW Project
Page as of 3 Nov 1992 and the WWW project web of the time, including the
list of all 26 resoanably reliable
servers, NCSA's having just been added, but no sign of Mosaic.
1993
- January
- By now, Midas (Tony Johnson, SLAC), Erwise (HUT), and Viola (Pei Wei,
O'Reilly Associates) browsers are available for X; CERN Mac browser
(ECP) released as alpha. Around 50 known HTTP servers.
- February
- NCSA release first alpha version of Marc Andreessen's "Mosaic for X".
Computing seminar at
CERN
- March
- WWW (Port 80 HTTP) traffic measures 0.1% of NSF backbone traffic. WWW
presented at Online
Publishing 93, Pittsburgh.
- April
- April 30: Date on the declaration by CERN's directors that WWW
technology would be freely usable by anyone, with no fees being payable
to CERN. A milestone document.
- July
- Ari Luotonen (ECP) joins the project at CERN. He implements access
authorisation, proceeds to re-write the CERN httpd server.
- August
- O'Reilly hosts first WWW Wizards Workshop in Cambridge Mass (US).
- September
- WWW (Port 80 http) traffic measures 1% of NSF backbone traffic. NCSA
releases working versions of Mosaic browser for all common platforms: X,
PC/Windows and Macintosh.
- October
- Over 200 known HTTP servers. The European Commission, the Fraunhofer
Gesellschaft and CERN start the first Web-based project of the European
Union (DG XIII): WISE, using the Web for dissemination of technological
information to Europe's less favoured regions.
- December
- WWW receives IMA award. John Markov writes a page and a half on WWW
and Mosaic in "The New York Times" (US) business section. "The Guardian"
(UK) publishes a page on WWW, "The Economist" (UK) analyses the Internet
and WWW.
Robert Cailliau gets go-ahead from CERN management to organise the First
International WWW Conference at CERN.
1994
- January
- O'Reilly, Spry, etc announce "Internet in a box" product to bring the
Web into homes.
- March
- Marc Andreessen and colleagues leave NCSA to form "Mosaic
Communications Corp" (now Netscape).
- May 25-27
- First International WWW
Conference, CERN, Geneva. Heavily oversubscribed (800 apply, 400
allowed in): the "Woodstock of the Web". VRML is conceived here.
- June
- M. Bangemann report on European
Commission Information Superhighway plan. Over 1500 registered servers.
Load on the first Web server (info.cern.ch) 1000 times what it has
been 3 years earlier.
- July
- MIT/CERN agreement to start W3 Organisation is announced by Bangemann
in Boston.
Press release.
AP wire. Reports in Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe etc.
- August
- Founding of the IW3C2: the
International WWW Conference Committee, in Boston, by NCSA and
CERN.
- September
- The European Commission and CERN propose the WebCore project for
development of the Web core technology in Europe.
- October
- Second International WWW Conference:
"Mosaic and the Web", Chicago. Also heavily oversubscribed: 2000 apply,
1300 allowed in.
- 14 December
- First W3 Consortium Meeting at
M.I.T. in Cambridge (USA).
- 15 December
- First meeting with European Industry and the European Consortium
branch, at the European
Commission, Brussels.
- 16 December
- CERN Council approves unanimously the construction of the LHC (Large Hadron
Collider) accelerator, CERN's next machine and competitor to the US'
already defunct SSC (Superconducting Supercollider). Stringent budget
conditions are however imposed. CERN thus decides not to continue WWW
development, and in concertation with the European Commission and INRIA (the Institut National pour la
Recherche en Informatique et Automatique, FR) transfers the WebCore
project to INRIA.
1995
- February
- the Web is the main reason for the theme of the G7 meeting hosted by
the European Commission in the European Parliament buildings in Brussels
(BE).
- March
- CERN holds a two-day seminar for
the European Media (press, radio, TV), attended by 250 reporters, to
show WWW. It is demonstrated on 60 machines, with 30 pupils from the
local International High School helping the reporters "surf the
Web".
- April
- Third International WWW Conference: "Tools
and Applications", hosted by the Fraunhofer Gesellschaft, in
Darmstadt (DE)
- June
- Founding of the Web Society in
Graz (AT), by the Technical University of Graz (home of Hyper-G), CERN,
the University of Minnesota (home of Gopher) and INRIA.
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