[6567] in www-talk@info.cern.ch
Re: A WWW history question
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Daniel W. Connolly)
Fri Nov 4 12:29:15 1994
Date: Fri, 4 Nov 1994 18:28:42 +0100
Errors-To: listmaster@www0.cern.ch
Reply-To: connolly@hal.com
From: "Daniel W. Connolly" <connolly@hal.com>
To: Multiple recipients of list <www-talk@www0.cern.ch>
In message <9411041150.AA12962@flame.falch.no>, Steinar Bang writes:
>Here's a history questions for the old-timers:
>
>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?
I gather that TimBL believed that hypertext _is_ an single consistent
user interface to different network services:
---
From: WorldWideWeb: Proposal for a HyperText Project
at: http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/Proposal.html
WorldWideWeb:
Proposal for a HyperText Project
T. Berners-Lee / CN, R. Cailliau / ECP
Abstract:
HyperText is a way to link and access information of various kinds as a web of
nodes in which the user can browse at will. Potentially, HyperText provides a
single user-interface to many large classes of stored information such as
reports, notes, data-bases, computer documentation and on-line systems help. We
propose the implementation of a simple scheme to incorporate several different
servers of machine-stored information already available at CERN, including an
analysis of the requirements for information access needs by experiments.
---
see also: "WWW Project History"
at http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/History.html
The WWW project is _very_ well documented on info.cern.ch. It's fairly ironic
that most WWW users get their info from NCSA's whats-new and FAQ documents,
and never get the background info from info.cern.ch. They end up asking
historical and architectural questions on www-talk or comp.infosystems....
that would be easily answered with 5 minutes surfing around info.cern.ch.
Oh... and do dispell a popular myth: the CERN LineMode browser is
_not_ the original WWW client. The original WWW client was a WYWIWYG
HTML editor and multi-window browser that TimBL wrote for the
NeXTStep environment. I thought it was kinda funny when somebody asked
on comp.infosystems.www.* "Is there a WWW client for the NeXT?"
Dan
