The web is a wonderful place. It connects people from across the
globe, keeps us updated with our friends and family, and creates
revolutions never before seen in our lifetime. It has certainly come a
long way since its humble beginnings back in the early 1980's..
World Wide Web thumbnail Dribbbled by Zachary VanDeHey and featured in Smashing Magazine's “Redesign The Web” Poster Contest
In this article I'm going to look at the journey the World Wide Web's gone through to become the powerhouse that it is today and establish what we can learn from the past.
In order to understand the history of the World Wide Web it's important to understand the differences between the World Wide Web and The Internet. Many people refer to them as the same thing, but in fact, although the end result is the common perception of most everyday users, they are very different.
The internet is a series of huge computer networks that allows many computers to connect and communicate with each other globally. Upon the internet reside a series of languages which allow information to travel between computers. These are known as protocols. For instance, some common protocols for transferring emails are IMAP, POP3 and SMTP. Just as email is a layer on the internet, the World Wide Web is another layer which uses different protocols.
The World Wide Web uses three protocols:
HTML (Hypertext markup language) - The language that we write our web pages in.
HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol ) - Although other protocols can be used such as FTP, this is the most common protocol. It was developed specifically for the World Wide Web and favored for its simplicity and speed. This protocol requests the 'HTML' document from the server and serves it to the browser.
URLS (Uniform resource locator) - The last part of the puzzle required to allow the web to work is a URL. This is the address which indicates where any given document lives on the web. It can be defined as <protocol>://<node>/<location>
In the Beginning…
Ideas for the World Wide Web date back to as early as 1946 when Murray
Leinster wrote a short story which described how computers (that he
referred to as 'Logics') lived in every home, with each one having
access to a central device where they could retrieve information.
Although the story does have several differences to the way the web
works today, it does capture the idea of a huge information network
available to everyone in their homes.
The real vision and execution for the World Wide Web didn't come about until around 40 years later in 1980 when an English chap by the name of Tim Berners Lee was working on a project known as 'Enquire'. Enquire was a simple database of people and software who were working at the same place as Berners Lee. It was during this project that he experimented with hypertext. Hypertext is text that can be displayed on devices which utilize hyperlinks. The Berners Lee Enquire system used hyperlinks on each page of the database, each page referencing other relevant pages within the system.
The real vision and execution for the World Wide Web didn't come about until around 40 years later in 1980 when an English chap by the name of Tim Berners Lee was working on a project known as 'Enquire'. Enquire was a simple database of people and software who were working at the same place as Berners Lee. It was during this project that he experimented with hypertext. Hypertext is text that can be displayed on devices which utilize hyperlinks. The Berners Lee Enquire system used hyperlinks on each page of the database, each page referencing other relevant pages within the system.
Tim Berners Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, at the London 2012 Olympic opening ceremony.
Berners Lee was a physicist and in his need to share information with other physicists around the world found out that there was no quick and easy solution for doing so. With this in mind, in 1989 he set about putting a proposal together for a centralized database which contained links to other documents. This would have been the perfect solution for Tim and his colleagues, but it turned out nobody was interested in it and nobody took any notice - except for one person. Tim's boss liked his idea and encouraged him to implement it in their next project. This new system was given a few different names such as TIM (The Information Mine) which was turned down as it abbreviated Tim's initials. After a few suggestions, there was only one name that stuck; the World Wide Web.
The First Browsers
By December 1990 Tim had joined forces with another physicist Robert Cailliau who rewrote Tim's original proposal. It was their vision to combine hypertext with the internet to create web pages, but no one at that time could appreciate how successful this idea could be.
Despite little interest, Berners Lee continued to develop three major components for the web; HTTP, HTML and the world first web browser. Funnily enough, this browser was also called "the World Wide Web" and it also doubled as an editor.
Tim Berners Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, at the London 2012 Olympic opening ceremony.
Berners Lee was a physicist and in his need to share information with other physicists around the world found out that there was no quick and easy solution for doing so. With this in mind, in 1989 he set about putting a proposal together for a centralized database which contained links to other documents. This would have been the perfect solution for Tim and his colleagues, but it turned out nobody was interested in it and nobody took any notice - except for one person. Tim's boss liked his idea and encouraged him to implement it in their next project. This new system was given a few different names such as TIM (The Information Mine) which was turned down as it abbreviated Tim's initials. After a few suggestions, there was only one name that stuck; the World Wide Web.
The First Browsers
By December 1990 Tim had joined forces with another physicist Robert Cailliau who rewrote Tim's original proposal. It was their vision to combine hypertext with the internet to create web pages, but no one at that time could appreciate how successful this idea could be.
Despite little interest, Berners Lee continued to develop three major components for the web; HTTP, HTML and the world first web browser. Funnily enough, this browser was also called "the World Wide Web" and it also doubled as an editor.
Berners Lee was a physicist and in his need to share information with other physicists around the world found out that there was no quick and easy solution for doing so. With this in mind, in 1989 he set about putting a proposal together for a centralized database which contained links to other documents. This would have been the perfect solution for Tim and his colleagues, but it turned out nobody was interested in it and nobody took any notice - except for one person. Tim's boss liked his idea and encouraged him to implement it in their next project. This new system was given a few different names such as TIM (The Information Mine) which was turned down as it abbreviated Tim's initials. After a few suggestions, there was only one name that stuck; the World Wide Web.
The First Browsers
By December 1990 Tim had joined forces with another physicist Robert Cailliau who rewrote Tim's original proposal. It was their vision to combine hypertext with the internet to create web pages, but no one at that time could appreciate how successful this idea could be.
Despite little interest, Berners Lee continued to develop three major components for the web; HTTP, HTML and the world first web browser. Funnily enough, this browser was also called "the World Wide Web" and it also doubled as an editor.
Tim Berners Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, at the London 2012 Olympic opening ceremony.
Berners Lee was a physicist and in his need to share information with other physicists around the world found out that there was no quick and easy solution for doing so. With this in mind, in 1989 he set about putting a proposal together for a centralized database which contained links to other documents. This would have been the perfect solution for Tim and his colleagues, but it turned out nobody was interested in it and nobody took any notice - except for one person. Tim's boss liked his idea and encouraged him to implement it in their next project. This new system was given a few different names such as TIM (The Information Mine) which was turned down as it abbreviated Tim's initials. After a few suggestions, there was only one name that stuck; the World Wide Web.
The First Browsers
By December 1990 Tim had joined forces with another physicist Robert Cailliau who rewrote Tim's original proposal. It was their vision to combine hypertext with the internet to create web pages, but no one at that time could appreciate how successful this idea could be.
Despite little interest, Berners Lee continued to develop three major components for the web; HTTP, HTML and the world first web browser. Funnily enough, this browser was also called "the World Wide Web" and it also doubled as an editor.
A screenshot of the world's first web browser.
On June 8th 1991, the World Wide Web project was announced to the world where the man himself described it:
On June 8th 1991, the World Wide Web project was announced to the world where the man himself described it:
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.
On August 6, 1991 the world's first web page was launched. A copy of the site is still available.
