The World Wide Web

THE WORLD WIDE WEB IS ONE PIECE OF THE APPLICATION OF COMPUTER TECHNOLOGY that has had a profound impact. According to an article in the Oct. 6 issue of The New Yorker, the web was a fusion of two earlier technologies: the internet and hypertext, a way of organizing documents non-hierarchically through links. Hypertext dated to the 1940s, when the science administrator Vannevar Bush wrote an article about a device that could represent knowledge "As Freely as We May Think."

This led to Tim Berners-Lee, who is British and a research fellow at Oxford and an emeritus professor at MIT, inventing the web in 1989. He wrote the hypertext markup language that a browser is interpreting. According to the article, he divides his time between the U.K., Canada, and Concord, Mass., where he and his wife live.

The article states that before we had the World Wide Web, the internet was without form, and void, and data trickled through the ports of the routers. The author explains that "technically, the internet is a protocol: a set of rules that let computers send and receive data over various networks by breaking it into packets."This inter-network originated at the Department of Defense. By the late eighties, it had spread to civilians, who could send email, transfer files, and post on forums through subscription-based services such as CompuServe and AOL. (Remember those?)

In 1993 there were about 50 web servers on the internet, and this number has grown considerably since. New hosts customarily emailed Berners-Lee to let him know they were online. The idea was to make facts, statistics, and just about any structured information free online. The article uses as an example a database of magazines that could link to further databases, on down to the facts in particular articles, which in turn might link to the sources they cited. Berners-Lee believed this capability would change the world. It did!

But he could see that the web needed something more than HTML (HyperText Markup Language). So he decided its successor XHTML (Extensible HyperText Markup Language) would separate information and would present it more clearly, making pages easier for computers to read. But his skeptics wanted to keep improving HTML and formed a rival standard, which became known as Web 2.0, according to the article, powering Twitter's (now X) endless scroll and Google's smoothly panning maps.

Marc Andreessen, co-founder of Netscape, proposed to Berners-Lee the imbedding of pictures in pages. Berners-Lee was not interested. In 1993 Andreessen introduced Mosaic, the first modern browser. This made Andreesen a multimillionaire when Netscape went public.

There is more to the story, which is very educational. If interested I suggest you download a copy of the article. The title is Pandora's Patch. The author is Julian Lucas. PTMR

Bill Lockwood is Chairman & Publisher of PTMReview
Bill can be reached at wal@computertalk.com