The History of the Web

The World Wide Web (W3) is the universe of network-accessible information, an embodiment of human knowledge. It is an initiative started at CERN, now with many participants.

-- CERN the inventors of the World-Wide Web

In the late 1980s, research scientists were using Internet mail and file transfer to communicate with colleagues all over the world. They soon realized that there must be a way of publishing their research findings on the Internet so that the supporting references, vital for understanding their work, also could be available to the reader.

The trouble was that, although much of the information was available through the Internet, it required a major effort for the reader to go through the convoluted procedures necessary to locate all the sources and download them to his or her computer. At that time, the Internet was a far less user-friendly place than it is today. Everything was done by typing in complex Unix commands.

And so the World Wide Web project was born. Spearheaded by the CERN atomic energy laboratories in Switzerland, the Web project has succeeded brilliantly. The first major milestone came in 1989 when the Web protocols, software and language were released. The second breakthrough came late in 1993, when the reader software NCSA Mosaic brought full hypermedia to the Internet.

The World Wide Web is literally global hypertext. publishing A Web article can have links to any Web document or Internet resource, located anywhere on the Internet. With a suitable Internet connection and properly-configured Web software, everthing that is currently published on the Web is available to you. In Cyberspace, there is no here or there. Australia is as close as Abbottsford.

It's an astounding thought millions of megabytes of information, in theory the entire knowledge base of human kind, acessible to you within milliseconds. Ted Nelson explains the superiority of global hypertext over conventional storage technology this way:

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