[6564] in www-talk@info.cern.ch
Re: A WWW history question
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Alastair Aitken CLMS)
Fri Nov 4 09:10:17 1994
Date: Fri, 4 Nov 1994 14:39:36 +0100
Errors-To: listmaster@www0.cern.ch
Reply-To: ZPALASTAIR@CLUSTER.NORTH-LONDON.AC.UK
From: Alastair Aitken CLMS <ZPALASTAIR@CLUSTER.NORTH-LONDON.AC.UK>
To: Multiple recipients of list <www-talk@www0.cern.ch>
Steinar Bang writes:
>Would it be correct to say that the earliest idea of the WWW was to
>offer a single consistent user interface to different network
>services, rather than a world wide hypertext system?
This question appears to confuse servers and browsers. A single user
interface is, by definition, a browser, whilst a world wide hypertext
system, although not necessarily a server, is definitely not a browser. If
you look at the original www browser it does *not* fit the bill for a multi
purpose browser.
Tim Berners-Lee is interviewed about the origins and future of the web in
the October issue of "Internet World". This article may also be available
electronically but I cannot say where. He comments in this article that he
"... would like a single user interface for all of these things [usenet,
e-mail and the web] ..." which would seem to suggest that the original
intention was a distributed hypertext system.
Alastair. (who is virtually sigless)
