http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/5242252.stm
How the web went world wide
By Mark Ward
Technology Correspondent, BBC News website
Thursday, 3 August 2006
In a few short years the web has become so familiar that it is hard to think of life
without it.
Along with that familiarity with browsers and bookmarks goes a little knowledge about
the web's history.
Many users know that Sir Tim Berners-Lee developed the web at the Cern physics
laboratory near Geneva.
But few will know the details of the world wide web's growth - not least because the
definitive history of how that happened has yet to be written.
Zero to hero
One key date is 6 August 1991 - the day on which links to the fledgling computer code
for the www were put on the alt.hypertext discussion group so others could download it
and play with it.
On that day the web went world wide.
Jeff Groff, who worked with Mr. Berners-Lee on the early code, said a very simple idea
was behind the web.
"The vision was that people should not have to deal with the technology stuff," he said.
The web was an overlay that tried to hide the underlying complexity of the data and
documents proliferating on the internet.
Early on this commitment to simplicity meant that the now familiar addresses beginning
http:// were never seen.
In the early 90s a single way to get at the information stored on many different computers
was very attractive, said Paul Kunz, a staff scientist at the Stanford Linear Accelerator
Center (Slac) who set up the first web server outside Europe in December 1991.
At that time, he said, computers were islands of information. A login only gave access to
that machine's resources. Switching computers meant logging in again and probably
using a different set of commands to find and retrieve data.
The web really caught Mr. Kunz's interest after Tim Berners-Lee showed it querying a
database of physics papers held on an IBM mainframe.
"I knew what the results should look like on the screen and the results looked identical in
the web browser," said Mr. Kunz.
The web server set up by Mr. Kunz let physicists trawl through the 200,000 abstracts
more easily than ever before.
This proved so useful that soon even Cern scientists were querying the database via the
Slac webpage rather than using the copy on their network.
Audience share
But though physicists were being won over by the web's promise, in the early years few
others grasped its potential.
This was because, said Mr. Kunz, many other technologies existed that did a similar job.
Many people got hold of key documents using the File Transfer Protocol (FTP) and used
Usenet as a means to express themselves.
Particularly popular was a technology known as Gopher developed at the University of
Minnesota that also put a friendly face on the blooming complexity of the computers
connected to the internet. It got the name partly because the college's sports team is called
the Golden Gophers.
Gopher was released in Spring 1991 and for a few years statistics showed far more
gopher traffic was passing across the net than web traffic.
During this time Mr. Berners-Lee, Jeff Groff and colleagues involved in the world wide
web project were evangelising their creation at conferences, meetings and online.
The whole project got a boost in April 1993 when the first PC web browser appeared. It
was created by Marc Andreessen at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications
at the University of Illinois rather than at Cern because, said Jeff Groff, the web team did
not have the staff available to write browsers for PCs, Macs or Unix machines.
Mosaic was so successful that it established many of the conventions of web use still
around today, said Mr. Groff. For instance, he said, the original conception of the web
had no place for bookmarks or favourites.
Express Yourself
Also in 1993, the University of Minnesota began charging for Gopher which led many
people to consider alternatives far more seriously.
Ed Vielmetti, a pioneering web user and now a research associate at the University of
Michigan School of Information, said during these early years the technology really
started to prove its usefulness to average net users.
Gopher and FTP systems were typically set up by companies or large institutions, he said.
Also Usenet lacked any kind of persistence so anyone making a point had to re-post their
opinions regularly.
Early on people started to use webpages as a way to express themselves in a way that
other technologies simply did not allow. Mr. Vielmetti said web code was very tolerant of
mistakes and encouraged people to play around with it.
"Websites filled this unique little niche for you as a person, not as a corporate entity, and
you can have the page sitting there and have it be yours," he said.
Every surge of interest in the web has been driven by the appearance of tools that make
this expression, or a new type of it such as blogging, far easier than before.
The foresight of Mr. Berners-Lee and the pioneering coders was such that, even today,
many early webpages can still be viewed. That persistence can last decades.
"The killer application for the PC was the spreadsheet, for the Mac it was desktop
publishing and for the internet it was the web," said Paul Kunz.
He added: "Tim Berners-Lee was working on a problem to solve in high-energy physics
but in finding a solution he found a solution to problems that the general public did not
know they had."
In late 1994 web traffic finally overtook gopher traffic and has never looked back. Now
there are almost 100 million websites and many consider the web and the net
indistinguishable.
But, said Mr. Groff, only now is the web meeting the vision that the pioneers had for it.
The original conception was for a medium that people both read and contributed to. New
tools such as photo-sharing sites, social networks, blogs, wikis and others are making
good on that early promise, he said.
The web may be worldwide but it is only just getting started.