4/203.3.1 History
In 1989, Tim Berners-Lee, a scientist at CERN (the European Particle Physics Laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland) wrote the internal paper ``Information Management: A Proposal''. He wanted to develop a hypertext system for international cooperation of scientists using the Internet. A reformulated version of the proposal, with Robert Cailliau as co-author, was finally accepted in 1990, and the World Wide WWW (W3, WWW, WWW) was born. The first World Wide WWW program was developed for NeXTStep machines, a WYSIWYG browser/editor. In 1991, the technical student Nicola Pellow developed a line-mode browser.In 1993, Marc Andreesson's first XWindows WWW-browser, XMosaic, was released by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA). This was the time when the world became actually interested in the WWW. A year later, Mark Andreesson left NCSA, and together with Silicon Graphics founder Jim Clark he formed ``Mosaic Communication Corp'' (now Netscape Communication Corp). Versions of Mosaic for PC/Windows and Macintosh were developed.
At the First International WWW Conference, in May 1994 at CERN, only 400 of the 800 who applied were accepted. Even at the Second International WWW Conference, in October 1994 in Chicago, 2000 applied and only 1300 could be accommodated.
In the same year the W3 Consortium was created to develop common
protocols that enhance the interoperability and promote the evolution of the
World Wide WWW![[*]](/Teaching/theses/1997/_idbde_/rpersche/images/foot_motif.gif)
. It is an industry
consortium jointly run by the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science (LCS) in
the USA, the National Institute for Research in Computer Science and Control
(INRIA) in France, and Keio University in Japan.
Nowadays, the number of WWW users is growing exponentially. It is difficult to open a newspaper without finding an article about WWW or related topics. Why is that so? Earlier commercial hypermedia applications were primarily stand-alone programs, and Internet-communication was mainly text- based, and therefore not very interesting for computer illiterate users. WWW was the first combination of an easy-to-use hypermedia system with access to global data via the Internet [Len97]. There is no doubt that the free distribution of browser software, at least for evaluation and educational purposes, has had a major impact on the fast growth of WWW. Besides, you can get new browsers simply by downloading the software directly from the Internet on-the-click. Unfortunately, the infrastructure of the Internet has not grown as fast as the number of Internet users has, and therefore transfer rates get slower every day. This fact can make downloading software a rather boring task.