The World Wide Web beginning and early years

On August 6, 1991 Tim Berners-Lee, a computer scientist, wrote in a newsgroup: 

 The WWW Project merges the techniques of information retrieval and hypertext to make an easy but powerful global information system…The project started with the philosophy that much academic information should be freely available to anyone…

This date is known as the birth of the World Wide Web.

The World Wide Web, WWW, or Web is a model that specifies how to share and access information over the Internet. The first steps to becoming the web a reality had taken place in 1980 when Tim Berners-Lee, a graduated in Physics from Queen’s College at Oxford University, started working as Independent Contractor at CERN(European Organization for Nuclear Research). During that time, projects’ information was stored and updated in different computers, and sharing information was difficult because of the differences in hardware, operating systems and software. To solve that issue and improve the way of organizing and sharing the information Berners-Lee built Enquire, an hypertext based software that allowed users create, edit and extract information. Enquire was the predecessor of Web.

Berners-Lee left the company in 1981, but he came back in 1984 as a fellow. In 1989, he wrote a first proposal of his global hypertext project, and although he didn’t get any attention, his boss Mike Sendall encouraged him to begin working on it in a NeXT workstation. At that time Robert Cailliau, an informatics engineer at the Data Handling division, joined him and helped to re-write the proposal. At the end of 1990, Berners-Lee had built all the needed tools for implementing his project:

• Hypertext Transfer Protocol v 0.9 (HTTP)
• Hypertext Markup Language (HTML)
• a web browser WorldWideWeb that was also a web editor
• an HTTP Server (CERN HTTPd)
• the first Web Server (http://info.cern.ch)
• and the first web page 

Berners-Lee mentioned that some name options for his project were “Mine of Information,” “The information Mine,” and “Information Mesh.” But, in the end he decided to name it “World Wide Web.”

And, on August 6, 1991, the World Wide Web made its debut when Berners-Lee posted in the alt.hypertext newsgroup an introduction and summary about the project. At the end of that year, Paul Kunz from the SLAC (Stanford Linear Accelerator Center) download the software, and Louse Addis adapted it to create a catalog of documents in the SLAC’s IBM Mainframe. This was the first web server in North America.

 The first web browser WoldWideWeb

During the first years, the web’s users were universities scientific departments and laboratories. However, that was about to change with the evolution of the web browsers. This began in 1992, when students of the Helsinki University of Technology developed Erwise, which was made for UNIX systems. Berners-Lee made a review of this application and explained that some of the features were multifont text, underlined links, users had to double click to jump, multiple and single window mode, allowed to open a local file, well managed display, scroll bars in both directions, and it also had a find field. Erwise was just a master’s project and got no later support.

 Erwise web browser

In May 1992, Pei-Yuan Wei a student from Berkeley University released ViolaWWW a web browser for UNIX and XWindows Systems. According to Berners-Lee, Viola had also multfont text, links highlighted with button boxes, and users had to single click to jump. It also had home, back, and forward buttons, history window, bookmark facility and online help.

 ViolaWWW web browser

During the same year, Students of NCSA (National Center for Super Computing Application of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) began the development of Mosaic, which was released in 1993. Mosaic opened the web to the general public, because it was not only user friendly but also cross-platform. Also, it was the first web browser displaying images inline with the text instead of displaying images in a separate window. In 1994 NCAS assign the commercial rights of Mosaic to spyglass Inc. which later licensed their technology to other companies like Microsoft that used it in Internet Explorer. Some members of the Mosaic’s developing group started their own company called Mosaic Communication Corporation later renamed Netscape which produced Netscape Navigator.

 Mosaic Web browser

In April 1993, CERN agreed that anyone could use the Web protocol and code free. In 1994 the first international WWW conference was held at CERN and organized by Robert Cailliau. In September of the same year, Berners-Lee founded World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) that has the objective of create standards and recommendations to improve the quality of the Web. The W3C decided that their standards must be based on royalty-free technology, so they can be easily adopted by anyone.

It's been 20 years since Berners-Lee invented the Web changing the way in which people share information and communicate.