History of the Web –
PART 1
;-)
History of the Web –
PART 1
;-)
The World-Wide-Web has revolutionized the
availability and
access to information.
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Billions of web pages may be reached through search engines,
and this is only a fraction of what is hidden in searchable databases.
bit.ly/WebHistoryNotes
Memex: The first Hypertext system
Dreamed up by Vanevar Bush:
“Memory Extension”
“As we may think” [1945]
Photo-electrico-mechanical desk
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Storage for knowledge
Computing device
With user interface
With powerful search
…but he did not call it “Hypertext”…
Term coined by Ted Nelson [1965]
Xanadu
Ambitious!
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Distributed network of documents
Two-way hyperlinks
Version management
Annotation
Elaborate copyright
management system
Far more powerful
than the web
but it did not succeed!
Why did it fail?
Text + Link… How about the Click!
Mouse and GUIs invented by Doug Engelbart
“On the augmentation of human intellect” [1968]
NLS: oNLineSystem demoed in
a “now-famous video”
Your impressions of the video?
Before the Web
Citation
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Reference to other text
Powerful!
Examples
 The Bible etc religious texts
 Encyclopedias
 Dictionaries
Hypertext
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Text + Links + Click!
Ease of citation use, really
Hypermedia
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(text/image/video/audio/etc) + links + click!
World-wide-web
Tim Berners-Lee implements
his childhood Enquire “2.0”
It took off because…
a
b
c
3 crucial components:
____, ____, ____
A global documentation
system at CERN [1990]
As a way of justifying the
purchase of a NeXT!
The early days of the Web : # HTTP hits
at CERN grows by 1000 (1991-1994)
8
The early days of the Web: # servers
grows from a 100’s to 1M (1991 – 1997)
9
Browsers
Erwise and Viola [1992]
were demo systems for s/w
Lynx [??] text-based browser
Mosaic [1993] popularized
the web
“It is on Mosaic”…
Confusion between
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The browser?
The web?
The internet?
1994: A landmark year
Mark Anderseen split from NCSA
to form “Mosaic Comm. Corp.;
forced to rename “Netscape”
First WWW conference at CERN
Dertouzos (MIT) and
Berners-Lee (CERN)
set up the WWW Consortium
(W3C) at MIT’s LCS
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Read TBL Ch. 5-9
Listing of Directories and Search Engines
Yahoo! (www.yahoo.com) - (1994-) directory service and search engine.
Infoseek – (1994-2001) search engine.
Inktomi – (1995- ?) search engine infrastructure, acquired by Yahoo! 2003.
AltaVista – (1995- ?) search engine, acquired by Overture in 2003.
AlltheWeb – (1999-?) search engine, acquired by Overture in 2003 .
Ask Jeeves (www.ask.com) - (1996-) Q&A and search engine, acquired by
IAC/InterActiveCorp in 2005.
Overture – (1997-) pay-per-click search engine, acquired by Yahoo! 2003.
MSN Search (www.msn.com) – (2004-2009) MS Network’s search engine.
Google (www.google.com) – (1998-) – Best known search engine.
Cuil (www.cuil.com) -- (2008 - ?) – latest “biggest” search engine.
bing (www.bing.com) (2009 - )MS’s better version
Baidu (2000 - ) Chinese-language search engine
Yandex (2012- ) Russian-language search Engine