There were a plethora of different data-indexing and retrieval experiments in the early days of the Net, but none was all-pervasive until, in 1991, Paul Lindner and Mark P. McCahill at the University of Minnesota created Gopher. Though it suffered from an overly cute (but highly descriptive) name, its technique for organizing files under an intuitive menuing system won it instant acceptance on the Net. The direct precursor in both concept and function to the World Wide Web, Gopher lacked hypertext links or graphic elements. Although Gopher servers sprung up quickly all over the Internet, it was almost immediately apparent that something more was needed.
By the time "Gopherspace" began to establish itself on the Net, the European High-Energy Particle Physics Lab (CERN) had become the largest Internet site in Europe and was the driving force in getting the rest of Europe connected to the Net. To help promote and facilitate the concept of distributed computing via the Internet, Tim Berners-Lee created the World Wide Web in 1992.
The Web was an extension of the Gopher idea, but with many, many improvements. Inspired by Ted Nelson's work on Xanadu and the hypertext concept, the World Wide Web incorporated graphics, typographic text styles, and--most importantly--hypertext links.
The World Wide Web used three new technologies:
* HTML (HyperText Markup Language) used to write Web pages.
* HTTP (HyperText Transfer Protocol) to transmit those pages.
* A Web browser client program to receive the data, interpret it, and display the results.
Using HTML, almost anyone with a text editor and access to an Internet site can build visually interesting pages that organize and present information in a way seldom seen in other online venues. In fact, Web sites are said to be composed of pages because the information on them looks more like magazine pages than traditional computer screens.
HTML is a markup language, which means that Web pages can only be viewed by using a specialized Internet terminal program called a Web browser. In the beginning, the potential was there for the typical computing "chicken and the egg problem": no one would create Web pages because no one owned a browser program to view them with, and no one would get a browser program because there were no Web pages to view.
Fortunately, this did not happen, because shortly after the Web was invented, a killer browser program was released to the Internet community--free of charge!
In 1993, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana released Mosaic, a Web browser designed by Marc Andreessen and developed by a team of students and staff at the University of Illinois (see Figure 1.2). It spread like wildfire though the Internet community; within a year, an estimated two million users were on the Web with Mosaic. Suddenly, everyone was browsing the Web, and everyone else was creating Web pages. Nothing in the history of computing had grown so fast.
By mid-1993, there were 130 sites on the World Wide Web. Six months later, there were over 600. Today, there may be as many as a million Web sites in the world (depending on whose figures you believe).
Mosaic's success--and the fact that its source code was distributed for free--spawned a wave of new browser introductions. Each topped the previous by adding new HTML commands and features. Marc Andreessen moved on from NCSA and joined with Jim Clark of Silicon Graphics to found Netscape Communications Corporation. They took along most of the NCSA Mosaic development team, which quickly turned out the first version of Netscape Navigator for Windows, Macintosh, and UNIX platforms. Because of its many new features and free trial preview offer, Netscape Navigator quickly became the most popular browser on the Web. The Web's incredible growth even attracted Microsoft's attention, and in 1995, they introduced their Internet Explorer Web browser to coincide with the launch of their new WWW service, the Microsoft Network (MSN).
Established online services like CompuServe, America Online, and Prodigy scrambled to meet their users' demands to add Web access to their systems. Most of them quickly developed their own versions of Mosaic, customized to work in conjunction with their proprietary online services. This enabled millions of established commercial service subscribers to spill over onto the Web virtually overnight; "old-timers" who had been on the Web since its beginning (only a year and a half or so before) suddenly found themselves overtaken by a tidal wave of Web-surfing newbies. Even television discovered the Web, and it seemed that every other news report featured a story about surfing the Net.
The World Wide Web didn't get its name by accident. It truly is a web that encompasses just about every topic in the world. A quick look at the premier index to the Web, Yahoo! (http://www.yahoo.com), lists topics as diverse as art, world news, sports, business, libraries, classified advertising, education, TV, science, fitness, and politics. You can't get much more diverse than that! There are literally thousands of sites listed on Yahoo! and other online indexes.
By the time "Gopherspace" began to establish itself on the Net, the European High-Energy Particle Physics Lab (CERN) had become the largest Internet site in Europe and was the driving force in getting the rest of Europe connected to the Net. To help promote and facilitate the concept of distributed computing via the Internet, Tim Berners-Lee created the World Wide Web in 1992.
The Web was an extension of the Gopher idea, but with many, many improvements. Inspired by Ted Nelson's work on Xanadu and the hypertext concept, the World Wide Web incorporated graphics, typographic text styles, and--most importantly--hypertext links.
The World Wide Web used three new technologies:
* HTML (HyperText Markup Language) used to write Web pages.
* HTTP (HyperText Transfer Protocol) to transmit those pages.
* A Web browser client program to receive the data, interpret it, and display the results.
Using HTML, almost anyone with a text editor and access to an Internet site can build visually interesting pages that organize and present information in a way seldom seen in other online venues. In fact, Web sites are said to be composed of pages because the information on them looks more like magazine pages than traditional computer screens.
HTML is a markup language, which means that Web pages can only be viewed by using a specialized Internet terminal program called a Web browser. In the beginning, the potential was there for the typical computing "chicken and the egg problem": no one would create Web pages because no one owned a browser program to view them with, and no one would get a browser program because there were no Web pages to view.
Fortunately, this did not happen, because shortly after the Web was invented, a killer browser program was released to the Internet community--free of charge!
In 1993, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana released Mosaic, a Web browser designed by Marc Andreessen and developed by a team of students and staff at the University of Illinois (see Figure 1.2). It spread like wildfire though the Internet community; within a year, an estimated two million users were on the Web with Mosaic. Suddenly, everyone was browsing the Web, and everyone else was creating Web pages. Nothing in the history of computing had grown so fast.
By mid-1993, there were 130 sites on the World Wide Web. Six months later, there were over 600. Today, there may be as many as a million Web sites in the world (depending on whose figures you believe).
Mosaic's success--and the fact that its source code was distributed for free--spawned a wave of new browser introductions. Each topped the previous by adding new HTML commands and features. Marc Andreessen moved on from NCSA and joined with Jim Clark of Silicon Graphics to found Netscape Communications Corporation. They took along most of the NCSA Mosaic development team, which quickly turned out the first version of Netscape Navigator for Windows, Macintosh, and UNIX platforms. Because of its many new features and free trial preview offer, Netscape Navigator quickly became the most popular browser on the Web. The Web's incredible growth even attracted Microsoft's attention, and in 1995, they introduced their Internet Explorer Web browser to coincide with the launch of their new WWW service, the Microsoft Network (MSN).
Established online services like CompuServe, America Online, and Prodigy scrambled to meet their users' demands to add Web access to their systems. Most of them quickly developed their own versions of Mosaic, customized to work in conjunction with their proprietary online services. This enabled millions of established commercial service subscribers to spill over onto the Web virtually overnight; "old-timers" who had been on the Web since its beginning (only a year and a half or so before) suddenly found themselves overtaken by a tidal wave of Web-surfing newbies. Even television discovered the Web, and it seemed that every other news report featured a story about surfing the Net.
The World Wide Web didn't get its name by accident. It truly is a web that encompasses just about every topic in the world. A quick look at the premier index to the Web, Yahoo! (http://www.yahoo.com), lists topics as diverse as art, world news, sports, business, libraries, classified advertising, education, TV, science, fitness, and politics. You can't get much more diverse than that! There are literally thousands of sites listed on Yahoo! and other online indexes.
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