Short story of the web

If the World Wide Web (WWW) has been famous only for the last few years, we have to go back until the end of the second World War to find its origins.

Indeed the first idea of hypertext dates from 1945 and was developed for... microfilms! American scientists worked tough to create a weird box (strange mixure between optics, mecanics and electronics), the Memex, able of creating links between several microfilms.

For about 15 years nothing else was developed about hypertext. But in the 60's, Doug Engelbart developed a brilliant prototype called "oNLine System" (NLS) able of skimming through and creating hypertext pages, writting mails... Engelbart also invented the mouse in that period.

In 1965 Ted Nelson finally invented the word "hypertext".

In 1980, Tim Berners-Lee developed a program called "Enquire-Within-Upon-Everything" that looks like a document case and that allow the creation of link between any kind of documents. Actually, every document has a title, a type and a list of links. This is the very basis of the Web.

March 1989: Tim Berners-Lee wrote a document whose goal is to improve the management of the CERN's information system. This document is called "Information Management: A Proposal"; it will help defining the foundations of the Web as it is today.

In september, 1990, Tim wrote another document that completely describes the working of an hypertext system. One month later, Tim developed the first web browser on a NexT station and called it "World Wide Web" (just like the project). On the 12th of November, 1990, Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau redescribed the hypertext project from scratch. The real World Wide Web was born, and in Chrismas 1990, we can surf on the web.

1991 is a very important year. The web client is dramatically improved and in August, its sources are available on newsgroups. A lot of services are deployed for it (the first web servers are created, dedicated newsgroups, mailing lists...).

The web client is still improved in 1992. At the end of the year, 26 web servers are running world-wide.

January 1993: 50 HTTP servers are running, and the first web client for X is available. From March to September, the HTTP traffic increased 10 times...

30th of April, 1993, historical moment: the CERN director declared that the web technologies must be free for everybody.

March 1994: Mosaic (Netscape) was founded.

25-27 May 1994: first international conference about the WWW. VRML is invented.

July 1994, the W3C is created. From then on, this body is in charge of controling the web and Internet standards.

References

The W3C Web site: http://www.w3.org/History.html

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