[423] in magellan
Fwd: Tomorrow's Professor Msg. #207 A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE WORLD
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Greg Anderson)
Wed Mar 29 10:52:43 2000
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Date: Wed, 29 Mar 2000 10:52:41 -0500
To: magellan@mit.edu, lisanti@mit.edu
From: Greg Anderson <ganderso@MIT.EDU>
FYI,
Greg
>From: reis@stanford.edu
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>Date: Tue, 28 Mar 2000 10:27:02 -0800
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>Subject: Tomorrow's Professor Msg. #207 A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE WORLD WIDE
> WEB
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>Folks:
>
>The posting below is just about the best brief description I have seen
>about the development of the World Wide Web. It is from: The Wired
>Professor : A Guide to Incorporating the World Wide Web in College
>Instruction, by Anne B. Keating with Joseph Hargitai. The excerpt is
>taken from Chapter 1 A History of Information Highways and Byways, pp.
>65-59. The publisher is New York University Press, copyright 1999,
>reprinted with permission.
>
>Regards,
>
>Rick Reis
>reis@stanford.edu
>UP NEXT: A Juggling Act
>
>
> Tomorrow's Research
> -------------- 1,324 words ---------------
> A BRIEF THE HISTORY OF THE WORLD WIDE WEB
>
>
>By 1980, students, computer science professors and other academics were the
>main users of the Internet. Ten years later, this state of affairs changed
>dramatically with the introduction of the World Wide Web. Within four years
>of its introduction, the World Wide Web eclipsed the Internet. Ben Segal
>notes that, "in the computer networking arena, a period of 10- 15 years
>represents several generations of technology evolution." It is therefore
>surprising "that in a period of only three years there can be developments
>that radically change the whole way that people think about computer
>communications. This has just happened with the Web (prototyped in 1990-1,
>fully accepted over 1993-4) .
>
>Describing the critical difference between the Internet and the Web, one
>observer wrote: "the Web differs from the Internet, though it uses the Net
>as a
>highway. Explore the Internet and you find computers, routers and cables.
>Explore the Web and you find information. "" The critical differences
>between the Internet and the World Wide Web are the use of "links" and the
>presence of graphics and text together. Web browsers in the 1990s hid the
>UNIX-based structure of the Internet under a layer of intuitive,
>graphically rich user interface. This is what permitted many people
>finally to use the Internet, much in the same way that the Windows
>operating system revolutionized personal computing for the noncomputer
>masses.
>
>In 1979, Tim Berners-Lee, a British computer scientist working as a
>consultant at the Swiss particle physics laboratory (CERN) became
>frustrated with the inability of his computerized schedule planner to link
>between databases. His phone numbers were saved in one database, while his
>documents were
>stored in different databases. As a solution, he created a hypertext
>computer program called Enquire-Within -Upon - Everything," which allowed
>"links to be made between
>arbitrary nodes. "' Although never published, "Enquire" became the
>foundation for the
>development of the Web. In 1984, Berners-Lee accepted a fellowship at CERN
>to work on distributed real-time systems for the collecting and sorting of
>scientific data. During this period he began to expand on the ideas in
>Enquire and in 1989 proposed "a global hypertext project, to be known as
>the World Wide Web."' His main motivation for the project came from the
>fact that at CERN there was no easy way for his colleagues to access each
>other's notes and documents. Software and hardware incompatibilities made
>electronic collaboration almost impossible. He wanted to create a "global
>information space" that would be an electronic version of the coffee area
>where people at CERN gathered to exchange information and collaborate on
>projects." In his proposal, he argued:
>
>----------
>The hope would be to allow a pool of information to develop which could
>grow and evolve with the organization and the projects it describes. For
>this to be possible, the method of storage must not place its own
>restraints on the information. This is why a "Web" of notes with links
>(like references) between them is far more useful than a fixed hierarchical
>system. When describing a complex system, many people resort to diagrams
>with circles and arrows. Circles and arrows leave one free to describe the
>interrelationships between things in a way that tables, for example, do
>not. The system we need is like a diagram of circles and arrows, where
>circles and arrows can stand for anything. We can call the circles nodes,
>and the arrows links."
>----------
>
>We now call the circles "Web pages," while the
>arrows remain "links." Berners-Lee went on to explain that
>
>----------
>several programs have been made exploring these ideas, both commercially
>and academically. Most of them use "hot spots' in documents, like icons, or
>highlighted phrases, as sensitive areas. Touching a hot spot with a mouse
>brings up the relevant information, or expands the text on the screen to
>include it. Imagine, then, the references in this document, all being
>associated with the network address of the thing to which they referred, so
>that while reading this document you could skip to them with 86 a click of
>the mouse.
>----------
>
>In his personal notebook, Berners-Lee explored this idea further,
>articulating an indexing system as follows:
>
>Here are some of the many areas in which hypertext is used. Each area has
>its specific requirements in the way of features required.
>
> General reference data-encyclopaedia, etc.
>
> Completely centralized publishing--online help, documentation,
> tutorial, etc.
>
> More or less centralized dissemination of news which has a limited life
>
> Collaborative authoring
>
> Collaborative design of something other
> than the hypertext
>
>He started work on this project in October 1990, and the program
>"WorldWideWeb" was first made available within CERN in December 1990 and on
>the Internet at large in the summer of 1991."
>
>Berners-Lee recalls that "there were three communities of users-the alt.
>hypertext Usenet newsgroup, Next [computer] users, and high-energy
>physicists. People started putting up servers, often writing their own
>software. This led to the development of various browsers."' Among the
>althypertext users was a group of students at the University of Illinois.
>Led by Marc Andreessen, they took Berners-Lee's program and added graphics
>capability. Out of their experiments, they developed Mosaic in 1993. Mosaic
>turned Berners-Lee's text-based browser into the fully graphical Web
>browsers we are familiar with today. Andreessen went on to develop Netscape
>Navigator, one of the leading Web browsers today.
>
>Mosaic was developed at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications
>(NCSA) at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. It was the first
>public domain graphical Internet browser and turned the Internet into a
>place where a user could just point and click to retrieve information. This
>launched the
>rapid growth of Internet. For Andreessen, the lack of an easy-to-use
>graphically oriented interface for the Web was a critical omission. "There
>was this huge hole in the world ... because a network existed with all
>these people hooked up to it, and the software was 10 years behind the
>hardware. This is typical of the personal computer industry today ...
>perhaps because of people like me, "' Andreessen argued that this was
>primarily due to the fact that programmers were daunted at the prospect of
>designing and building hardware. "Therefore the machines outstrip our
>capacity to use them.""
>
>In the early 1990s, when Andreessen worked at the supercomputer center, he
>observed that
>
>----------
>Everyone at the center was hooked on the Internet, but there was this big
>disconnect between the 'Net and the rest of the world. You basically needed
>a Ph.D. in Unix to do anything. The Web existed then, but there were only
>40 or 50 sites, and they were extremely hard to navigate. One of the other
>students, Eric Bina, and I were talking about this over lunch one day. We
>thought, wouldn't it be great if someone would sit down and write an
>interface that would make the Internet really easy to use?
>----------
>
>>From the very beginning, Andreessen and Bina disagreed with Berners-Lee
>about the design for the Web interface:
>
>----------
>We thought making this interface graphical was the key... Tim was looking
>for a way to connect a bunch of high-energy physicists, and he thought
>graphics were frivolous, unnecessary, and destructive. We didn't see it
>that way-we thought the information you see should be the interface. We
>wanted users to take over as much of the screen as possible and just put a
>navigational framework around that."
>----------
>
>They released the first beta version of Mosaic in March 1993. Andreessen
>recalls that, though initially there were only twelve users, "Within a few
>months we had 40,000 or 50,000. It was incredible. I graduated in December
>1993 and ... we started Netscape in April.""
>
>The release of Mosaic marked the beginning of the widespread use of the
>Web. Within a few years, the Internet was transformed from a small,
>informal gathering place for technically oriented users to a sprawling
>global gathering place for individuals who daily added to the wealth of
>information on the Web.
>
>RESEARCH LINKS AND RESOURCES
>
>
>1. In order to explore Telnet, you will need to get the Telnet program or
>"client.' TeInet clients are available for free or as shareware from
>Tucowsat http:11wwwtucows.com and Sharewarecom at http.11www.shareware.com.
>
>2. To find libraries (and other resources) available via Telnet, look
>through the Hytelnet database, available online at http:llwww. cam. ac.
>uklHytelnetlindexhtmL
>
>3. For available resources on Internet Relay Chat (IRC), see IRC Central at
>http:11WWWconneaed-media.comlIRCI.
>
>4. For general information on Internet chat, see David Barbieri's Meta
>Chats: The Internet Chat Resource Guide at http:11www.2meta.com1chats1.
>Barbieri has a listing of historic IRC logs at
>http:llwww.2meta.comlchatsluniversityl.
>
>5. Directory of Scholarly and Professional E-Conferences at
>httP:11n2h2.com1KOVACS1 is a database of academic listservs which can be
>searched by keyword, by subject or alphabetically by listserv name.
>
>6. Usenet can be searched using any of the top search engines or by going
>to Deja News at http:11www.dejanews.com1.
>
>7. To search Usenet postings, use Where is the archive for newsgroup X? at
>http:llstarbase.neosoft.coml-clairdlnews.listslnewsgroup-archives.htmL
>
>8. Liszt, the Mailing List Directory at http:11wwwlisztcom1, another
>listing of newsgroups, "is basically a mailing-list spider; it queries
>servers from around the world and compiles the results into a single
>directory. This method ensures that the data Liszt provides is always
>up-to-date, since it comes direct from the list servers each week .
>Includes an education category.
>
>9. World Wide Web Consortium at http.11wwww3.org, directed by Tim
>Berners-Lee, is an open forum of companies and organizations with the
>mission of realizing the full potential of the Web. "Services provided by
>the Consortium include: a repository of information about the World Wide
>Web for developers and users; reference code implementations to embody and
>promote standards; and various prototype and sample applications to
>demonstrate use of new technology.""
>
>10. An Atlas of Cyberspaces at http:llwwwcybergeographyorglatiaslatias.htmI
>is an online atlas to the Internet and the Web. This collection of maps is
>a good way to visualize the "new digital landscapes on our computer screen
>and in the wires of the global communications networks.'
>
>
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