History of the World Wide Web

The World Wide Web ("WWW"), not to be confused

with the "web", is a global information medium which users
can access via computers connected to the Internet. The term
is often mistakenly used as a synonym for the Internet itself
and often called "the Internet", but the Web is a service that
operates over the Internet, just as email (also e-mail)
and Usenet also do. The history of the Internet dates back
significantly further than that of the World Wide Web.

1980 –1991: Invention and implementation

In 1980, Tim Berners-Lee, an English independent
contractor at the European Organization for Nuclear
Research (CERN) in Switzerland, built ENQUIRE, as a
personal database of people and software models, but also as a
way to play with hypertext; each new page of information in
ENQUIRE had to be linked to a page.[3]
Berners-Lee's contract in 1980 was from June to December,
but in 1984 he returned to CERN in a permanent role, and
considered its problems of information management:
physicists from around the world needed to share data, yet
they lacked common machines and any shared presentation
software.
Shortly after Berners-Lee's return to CERN, TCP/IP protocols
were installed on some key non-Unix machines at the
institution, turning it into the largest Internet site in Europe
within a few years. As a result, CERN's infrastructure was
ready for Berners-Lee to create the Web.[6]
Berners-Lee wrote a proposal in March 1989 for "a large
hypertext database with typed links".[7] Although the proposal
attracted little interest, Berners-Lee was encouraged by his
boss, Mike Sendall, to begin implementing his system on a
newly acquired NeXT workstation.[8] He considered several
names, including Information Mesh,[7] The Information
Mine or Mine of Information, but settled on World Wide
Web.[9]

Robert Cailliau, Jean-François Abramatic and Tim Berners-

Lee at the 10th anniversary of the WWW Consortium.
Berners-Lee found an enthusiastic supporter in Robert
Cailliau. Berners-Lee and Cailliau pitched Berners-Lee's ideas
to the European Conference on Hypertext Technology in
September 1990, but found no vendors who could appreciate
his vision of marrying hypertext with the Internet. [10]
By Christmas 1990, Berners-Lee had built all the tools
necessary for a working Web: the HyperText Transfer
Protocol (HTTP),[11] the HyperText Markup
Language (HTML)
 The first Web browser (named WorldWideWeb, which was
also a Web editor), the first HTTP server software (later
known as CERN httpd), the first web
server (http://info.cern.ch), and the first Web pages that
described the project itself. The browser
couldaccess Usenet newsgroups and FTP files as well.
However, it could run only on the NeXT; Nicola
Pellow therefore created a simple text browser, called the Line
Mode Browser, that could run on almost any computer.[12] To
encourage use within CERN, Bernd Pollermann put the
CERN telephone directory on the web—previously users had
to log onto the mainframe in order to look up phone
numbers.[12]
While inventing and working on setting up the Web, Berners-
Lee spent most of his working hours in Building 31 (second
floor) at CERN (46.2325°N 6.0450°E), but also at his two
homes, one in France, one in Switzerland.[13] In January 1991
the first Web servers outside CERN itself were switched
on.[14]
The first web page may be lost, but Paul Jones of UNC-
Chapel Hill in North Carolina revealed in May 2013 that he
has a copy of a page sent to him in 1991 by Berners-Lee
which is the oldest known web page. Jones stored the plain-
text page, with hyperlinks, on a floppy disk and on his NeXT
computer.[15] CERN put the oldest known web page back
online in 2014, complete with hyperlinks that helped users get
started and helped them navigate what was then a very small
web.[16][17]
On 6 August 1991,[18] Berners-Lee posted a short summary of
the World Wide Web project on the alt.hypertext newsgroup,
inviting collaborators.[19] This date is sometimes confused
with the public availability of the first web servers, which had
occurred months earlier.
Paul Kunz from the Stanford Linear Accelerator
Center (SLAC) visited CERN in September 1991, and was
captivated by the Web. He brought the NeXT software back to
SLAC, where librarian Louise Addis adapted it for
the VM/CMS operating system on the IBM mainframe as a
way to display SLAC's catalog of online documents;[12] this
was the first Web server outside of Europe and the first in
North America.[20] The www-talk mailing list was started in
the same month.[14]
In 1992 the Computing and Networking Department of
CERN, headed by David Williams, did not support Berners-
Lee's work. A two-page email sent by Williams stated that the
work of Berners-Lee, with the goal of creating a facility to
exchange information such as results and comments from
CERN experiments to the scientific community, was not the
core activity of CERN and was a misallocation of CERN's IT
resources. Following this decision, Tim Berners-Lee left
CERN despite many of his peers in the IT center advocating
for his support, in particular, M. Ben Segal from the
distributed computing SHIFT project. He left for
the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he
continued to develop HTTP.
An early CERN-related contribution to the Web was the
parody band Les Horribles Cernettes, whose promotional
image is believed to be among the Web's first five
pictures.[21] The photo was scanned as a GIF file, using Adobe
Photoshop on a Macintosh.[22]
1992–1995: Growth
In keeping with its birth at CERN and the first page opened,
early adopters of the Web were primarily university-based
scientific departments or physics laboratories such
as Fermilab and SLAC. By January 1993 there were fifty Web
servers across the world. In April 1993 CERN made the
World Wide Web available on a royalty-free basis.[23] By
October 1993 there were over five hundred servers
online.[14] Two of the earliest webcomics started on the World
Wide Web in 1993: Doctor Fun and NetBoy[verification
needed] [24][25]
. In July 1993, The Wharton School published one
of the first collections of PDFs and was highlighted in
Adobe's 1995 annual report about use of PDFs on the web.
Early websites intermingled links for both the HTTP web
protocol and the then-popular Gopher protocol, which
provided access to content through hypertext menus presented
as a file system rather than through HTML files. Early Web
users would navigate either by bookmarking popular directory
pages, such as Berners-Lee's first site at http://info.cern.ch/, or
by consulting updated lists such as the NCSA "What's New"
page. Some sites were also indexed by WAIS, enabling users
to submit full-text searches similar to the capability later
provided by search engines.
Practical media distribution and streaming media over the
Web was made possible by advances in data compression, due
to the impractically high bandwidth requirements of
uncompressed media.[26] An important compression technique
in this regard is the discrete cosine
transform (DCT),[27] a lossy compression algorithm originally
developed by Nasir Ahmed, T. Natarajan and K. R. Rao at
the University of Texas in 1973.[28] Following the introduction
of the Web, several DCT-based media formats were
introduced for practical media distribution and streaming over
the Web, including the MPEG video format in 1991[27] and
the JPEG image format in 1992.[29] The high level of image
compression made JPEG a good format for compensating
slow Internet access speeds, typical in the age of dial-up
connections.[30] JPEG became the most widely used image
format for the World Wide Web.[31] A DCT variation,
the modified discrete cosine transform (MDCT) algorithm,
developed by J. P. Princen, A. W. Johnson and A. B. Bradley
at the University of Surrey in 1987,[32] led to the development
of MP3, which was introduced in 1994 and became the first
popular audio format on the Web.[33]
By the end of 1994, the total number of websites was still
minute compared to present figures, but quite a number
of notable websites were already active, many of which are
the precursors or inspiring examples of today's most popular
services.
In January 1994, Yahoo! was founded by Jerry
Yang and David Filo, then students at Stanford
University. Yahoo! Directory, launched in January 1994,
became the first popular Web directory. Yahoo! Search, later
launched in 1995, became the first popular search engine on
the World Wide Web. Yahoo! became the quintessential
example of a first mover on the Web.[34] Web commerce also
began emerging in 1995 with the founding of eBay by Pierre
Omidyar and Amazon by Jeff Bezos.
Early browsers[edit]
Initially, a web browser was available only for the NeXT
operating system. This shortcoming was discussed in January
1992,[14] and alleviated in April 1992 by the release of Erwise,
an application developed at the Helsinki University of
Technology, and in May by ViolaWWW, created by Pei-Yuan
Wei, which included advanced features such as embedded
graphics, scripting, and animation.[12] ViolaWWW was
originally an application for HyperCard. Both programs ran
on the X Window System for Unix.[12] In 1992, the first tests
between browsers on different platforms were concluded
successfully between buildings 513 and 31 in CERN, between
browsers on the NexT station and the X11-ported Mosaic
browser.
Students at the University of Kansas adapted an existing text-
only hypertext browser, Lynx, to access the web. Lynx was
available on Unix and DOS, and some web designers,
unimpressed with glossy graphical websites, held that a
website not accessible through Lynx wasn’t worth visiting.
The first Microsoft Windows browser was Cello, written by
Thomas R. Bruce for the Legal Information Institute
at Cornell Law School to provide legal information, since
access to Windows was more widespread amongst lawyers
than access to Unix. Cello was released in June 1993. [12]
The Web was first popularized by Mosaic,[35] a graphical
browser launched in 1993 by Marc Andreessen's team at
the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA)
at the University of Illinois at Urbana–
[36]
Champaign (UIUC). The origins of Mosaic date to 1992. In
November 1992, the NCSA at the University of Illinois
(UIUC) established a website. In December 1992, Andreessen
and Eric Bina, students attending UIUC and working at the
NCSA, began work on Mosaic with funding from the High-
Performance Computing and Communications Initiative, a
US-federal research and development program.[37] Andreessen
and Bina released a Unix version of the browser in February
1993; Mac and Windows versions followed in August
1993.[14] The browser gained popularity due to its strong
support of integrated multimedia, and the authors’ rapid
response to user bug reports and recommendations for new
features.
After graduation from UIUC, Andreessen and James H. Clark,
former CEO of Silicon Graphics, met and formed Mosaic
Communications Corporation in April 1994 to develop the
Mosaic Netscape browser commercially. The company later
changed its name to Netscape, and the browser was developed
further as Netscape Navigator.
Web governance[edit]
In May 1994, the first International WWW Conference,
organized by Robert Cailliau,[10][38] was held at CERN;[39] the
conference has been held every year since. In April 1993,
CERN had agreed that anyone could use the Web protocol
and code royalty-free; this was in part a reaction to the
concern caused by the University of Minnesota's
announcement that it would begin charging license fees for its
implementation of the Gopher protocol.
In September 1994, Berners-Lee founded the World Wide
Web Consortium (W3C) at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology with support from the Defense Advanced
Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and the European
Commission. It comprised various companies that were
willing to create standards and recommendations to improve
the quality of the Web. Berners-Lee made the Web available
freely, with no patent and no royalties due. The W3C decided
that its standards must be based on royalty-free technology, so
they can be easily adopted by anyone.
1996–1998: Commercialization[edit]
By 1996, it became obvious to most publicly traded
companies that a public Web presence was no longer
optional.[citation needed] Though at first people saw mainly[citation
needed]
the possibilities of free publishing and instant worldwide
information, increasing familiarity with two-way
communication over the "Web" led to the possibility of direct
Web-based commerce (e-commerce) and instantaneous group
communications worldwide. More dotcoms, displaying
products on hypertext webpages, were added into the Web.
In 1996, Robin Li developed RankDex, the first Web search
engine with a site-scoring algorithm for results page
ranking,[40][41][42] and received a US patent for the
technology.[43] It was the first search engine that used
hyperlinks to measure the quality of websites it was
indexing,[44] predating the similar PageRank algorithm patent
later filed by Google.[45] Li later used his Rankdex technology
for the Baidu search engine, which Li founded and launched
in 2000.
Google Search, which was notable for its PageRank
algorithm, was developed by Larry Page, Sergey
Brin and Scott Hassan between 1996 and 1997.[46][47][48] Page
referenced Li's work on RankDex in some of his US patents
for PageRank.[49] Google was eventually founded by Page and
Brin in 1998.
1999–2001: "Dot-com" boom and bust
Low interest rates in 1998–99 facilitated an increase in start-
up companies. Although a number of these new entrepreneurs
had realistic plans and administrative ability, most of them
lacked these characteristics but were able to sell their ideas to
investors because of the novelty of the dot-com concept.
Historically, the dot-com boom can be seen as similar to a
number of other technology-inspired booms of the past
including railroads in the 1840s, automobiles in the early 20th
century, radio in the 1920s, television in the 1940s, transistor
electronics in the 1950s, computer time-sharing in the 1960s,
and home computers and biotechnology in the 1980s.
In 2001 the bubble burst, and many dot-com startups went out
of business after burning through their venture capital and
failing to become profitable. Many others, however, did
survive and thrive in the early 21st century. Many companies
which began as online retailers blossomed and became highly
profitable. More conventional retailers found online
merchandising to be a profitable additional source of revenue.
While some online entertainment and news outlets failed
when their seed capital ran out, others persisted and
eventually became economically self-sufficient. Traditional
media outlets (newspaper publishers, broadcasters and
cablecasters in particular) also found the Web to be a useful
and profitable additional channel for content distribution, and
an additional means to generate advertising revenue. The sites
that survived and eventually prospered after the bubble burst
had two things in common: a sound business plan, and a niche
in the marketplace that was, if not unique, particularly well-
defined and well-served.
2002–present: Ubiquity
In the aftermath of the dot-com bubble, telecommunications
companies had a great deal of overcapacity as many Internet
business clients went bust. That, plus ongoing investment in
local cell infrastructure kept connectivity charges low, helped
to make high-speed Internet connectivity more affordable.
During this time, a handful of companies found success
developing business models that helped make the World Wide
Web a more compelling experience. These include airline
booking sites, Google's search engine and its profitable
approach to keyword-based advertising, as well as eBay's
auction site and Amazon.com's online department store.
This new era also begot social networking websites, such
as MySpace and Facebook, which gained acceptance rapidly
and became a central part of youth culture. The 2010s also
saw the emergence of various controversial trends, such as the
expansion of cybercrime and of internet censorship.