HISTORY
The WorldWideWeb (W3) is the universe of network-accessible information, an embodiment of human knowledge. It is an initiative started at CERN, now with many participants. It has a body of software, and a set of protocols and conventions. W3 uses hypertext and multimedia techniques to make the web easy for anyone to roam, browse, and contribute to. --Tim Berners-Lee 1993Essentially, World Wide Web (WWW) servers are information dissemination tools. They allow you to save information or data on your hard disk and allow others to access and read that information. The information you can disseminate can be simple ASCII text, formatted hypertext markup language (HTML) documents, graphics, sounds, and/or movies.
In 1989, Tim Berners-Lee of CERN (a particle physics laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland) began work on the World-Wide Web. The Web was initially intended as a way to share information between members of the high-energy physics community. By 1991, the Web had become operational. The World Wide Web is a hypertext system, a concept originally described by Vannevar Bush. The term "hypertext" was coined by Theodore H. Nelson. In a hypertext system, a document is presented to a reader that has "links" to other documents that relate to the original document and provide further information about it.
Not only does the hypertext feature work within documents, but it works between documents as well. For example, by clicking on Table Of Contents a new document will be presented to you, the table of contents of this handout. If you ever get lost, you can always use your WWW browsing software to go back to where you came because there is always a "go back" button or menu choice.
Scholarly journal articles represent an excellent application of this technology. For example, scholarly articles usually include multiple footnotes. With an article in hypertext form, the reader could select a footnote number in the body of the article and be "transported" to the appropriate citation in the notes section. The citation, in turn, could be linked to the cited article, and the process could go on indefinitely. The reader could also backtrack and follow links back to where he or she started.
Here are just a couple examples of electronic journal/magazine articles employing hypertext features:
The Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) that allows this technology to happen is older than the gopher protocol. The original CERN Web server ran under the NeXTStep operating system, and, since few people owned NeXT computers, HTTP did not become very popular. Similarly, the client side of the HTTP equation included a terminal-based system few people thought was aesthetically appealing. All this was happening just as the gopher protocol was becoming more popular. Since gopher server and client software was available for many different computing platforms, the gopher protocol's popularity grew while HTTP's languished.It wasn't until early 1993 that the Web really started to become popular. At that time, Bob McCool and Marc Andreessen, who worked for the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), wrote both Web client and server applications. Since the server application (httpd) was available for many flavors of UNIX, not just NeXTStep, the server could be easily used by many sites. Since the client application (NCSA Mosaic for the X Window System) supported graphics, WAIS (see WAIS, Inc., CNIDR's freeWAIS, and Ulrich Pfeifer's freeWAIS-sf), gopher, and FTP access, it was head and shoulders above the original CERN client in terms of aesthetic appeal as well as functionality. Later, a more functional terminal-based client (Lynx) was developed by Lou Montulli, who was then at the University of Kansas. Lynx made the Web accessible to the lowest common denominator devices, VT100-based terminals. When NCSA later released Macintosh and Microsoft Windows versions of Mosaic, the Web became even more popular. Since then, other Web client and server applications have been developed, but the real momentum was created by the developers at NCSA.
