The World Wide Web ("WWW" or "The Web") is a global information medium which users can access 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, just as email and Usenet also do. The history of the Internet dates back significantly further than that of the World Wide Web.
Precursors
The hypertext portion of the Web in particular has an intricate intellectual history; notable influences and precursors include Vannevar Bush's Memex,[3] IBM's Generalized Markup Language,[4] and Ted Nelson's Project Xanadu.[3] Paul Otlet's Mundaneum project has also been named as an early 20th-century precursor of the Web.[5] The concept of a global information system connecting homes is prefigured in "A Logic Named Joe", a 1946 short story by Murray Leinster, in which computer terminals, called "logics", are present in every home. Although the computer system in the story is centralized, the story anticipates a ubiquitous information environment similar to the Web. The cultural impact of the Web was imagined even further back in a short story by E. M. Forster, "The Machine Stops", first published in 1909.
1980–1991: Invention and implementation
In 1980, Tim Berners-Lee, an English independent contractor at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Switzerland, built ENQUIRE, as a personal database of people and software models, but also as a way to play with hypertext; each new page of information in ENQUIRE had to be linked to a page.[3] Berners-Lee's contract in 1980 was from June to December, but in 1984 he returned to CERN in a permanent role, and considered its problems of information management: physicists from around the world needed to share data, yet they lacked common machines and any shared presentation software. Shortly after Berners-Lee's return to CERN, TCP/IP protocols were installed on some key non-Unix machines at the institution, turning it into the largest Internet site in Europe within a few years. As a result, CERN's infrastructure was ready for Berners-Lee to create the Web.[6] Berners-Lee wrote a proposal in March 1989 for "a large hypertext database with typed links".[7] Although the proposal attracted little interest, Berners-Lee was encouraged by his boss, Mike Sendall, to begin implementing his system on a newly acquired NeXT workstation.[8] He considered several names, including Information Mesh,[7] The Information Mine or Mine of Information, but settled on World Wide Web.[9] Berners-Lee found an enthusiastic supporter in Robert Cailliau. Berners-Lee and Cailliau pitched Berners-Lee's ideas to the European Conference on Hypertext Technology in September 1990, but found no vendors who could appreciate his vision of marrying hypertext with the Internet.[10] By December 1990, Berners-Lee and his work team had built all the tools necessary for a working Web: the HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP),[11] the HyperText Markup Language (HTML), the first Web browser (named WorldWideWeb, which was also a Web editor), the first Web server (later known as CERN httpd) and the first Web site (http://info.cern.ch) containing the first Web pages that described the project itself.[12][13] The browser could access Usenet newsgroups and FTP files as well. However, it could run only on the NeXT; Nicola Pellow therefore created a simple text browser, called the Line Mode Browser, that could run on almost any computer.[14] To encourage use within CERN, Bernd Pollermann put the CERN telephone directory on the web—previously users had to log onto the mainframe in order to look up phone numbers.[14] While inventing and working on setting up the Web, Berners-Lee spent most of his working hours in Building 31 (second floor) at CERN (46.2325°N 6.0450°E), but also at his two homes, one in France, one in Switzerland.[15] In January 1991 the first Web servers outside CERN itself were switched on.[16] The first web page may be lost, but Paul Jones of UNC-Chapel Hill in North Carolina revealed in May 2013 that he has a copy of a page sent to him in 1991 by Berners-Lee which is the oldest known web page. Jones stored the plain-text page, with hyperlinks, on a floppy disk and on his NeXT computer.[17] CERN put the oldest known web page back online in 2014, complete with hyperlinks that helped users get started and helped them navigate what was then a very small web.[18][19]
1991–1995: The Web goes public, early growth
On 6 August 1991,[20] Berners-Lee posted a short summary of the World Wide Web project on the alt.hypertext newsgroup, inviting collaborators.[21] This date is sometimes confused with the public availability of the first web servers, which had occurred months earlier. Paul Kunz from the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) 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;[14] this was the first Web server outside of Europe and the first in North America.[22] The www-talk mailing list was started in the same month.[16] In 1992 the Computing and Networking Department of CERN, headed by David Williams, did not support Berners-Lee's work. A two-page email sent by Williams stated that the work of Berners-Lee, with the goal of creating a facility to exchange information such as results and comments from CERN experiments to the scientific community, was not the core activity of CERN and was a misallocation of CERN's IT resources. Following this decision, Tim Berners-Lee left CERN despite many of his peers in the IT center advocating for his support, in particular, M. Ben Segal from the distributed computing SHIFT project. He left for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he continued to develop HTTP. 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.[23] The photo was scanned as a GIF file, using Adobe Photoshop on a Macintosh.[24] In keeping with its birth at CERN and the first page opened, early adopters of the Web were primarily university-based scientific departments or physics laboratories such as Fermilab and SLAC. By January 1993 there were fifty Web servers across the world. In April 1993 CERN published an official statement and made the World Wide Web available on a royalty-free basis.[25][26] By October 1993 there were over five hundred servers online.[16] Two of the earliest webcomics started on the World Wide Web in 1993: Doctor Fun and NetBoy[verification needed].[27][28] In July 1993, The Wharton School published one of the first collections of PDFs and was highlighted in Adobe's 1995 annual report about use of PDFs on the web. 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. Practical media distribution and streaming media over the Web was made possible by advances in data compression, due to the impractically high bandwidth requirements of uncompressed media.[29] An important compression technique in this regard is the discrete cosine transform (DCT),[30] a lossy compression algorithm originally developed by Nasir Ahmed, T. Natarajan and K. R. Rao at the University of Texas in 1973.[31] Following the introduction of the Web, several DCT-based media formats were introduced for practical media distribution and streaming over the Web, including the MPEG video format in 1991[30] and the JPEG image format in 1992.[32] The high level of image compression made JPEG a good format for compensating slow Internet access speeds, typical in the age of dial-up connections.[33] JPEG became the most widely used image format for the World Wide Web.[34] A DCT variation, the modified discrete cosine transform (MDCT) algorithm, developed by J. P. Princen, A. W. Johnson and A. B. Bradley at the University of Surrey in 1987,[35] led to the development of MP3, which was introduced in 1994 and became the first popular audio format on the Web.[36] The Web started to enter everyday use during 1993 to 1994.[37] By the end of 1994, the total number of websites was still minute compared to present figures, but quite a number of notable websites were already active, many of which are the precursors or inspiring examples of today's most popular services. In January 1994, Yahoo! was founded by Jerry Yang and David Filo, then students at Stanford University. Yahoo! Directory, launched in January 1994, became the first popular Web directory. Yahoo! Search, later launched in 1995, became the first popular search engine on the World Wide Web. Yahoo! became the quintessential example of a first mover on the Web.[38] Web commerce also began emerging in 1995 with the founding of eBay by Pierre Omidyar and Amazon by Jeff Bezos.
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