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86 lines
4.6 KiB
86 lines
4.6 KiB
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 3.2//EN">
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<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
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<title>The World Wide Web: A very short personal history</title>
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<link href="general.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css">
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<p><a href="Overview.html">Tim Berners-Lee</a></p>
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<p>In response to a request, a one page looking back on the development of
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the Web from my point of view. Written 1998/05/07</p>
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<h2>The World Wide Web: A very short personal history</h2>
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<p>There have always been things which people are good at, and things
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computers have been good at, and little overlap between the two. I was
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brought up to understand this distinction in the 50s and 60s and intuition
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and understanding were human characteristics, and that computers worked
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mechanically in tables and hierarchies.</p>
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<p>One of the things computers have not done for an organization is to be
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able to store random associations between disparate things, although this is
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something the brain has always done relatively well. In 1980 I played with
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programs to store information with random links, and in 1989, while working
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at the European Particle Physics Laboratory, I proposed that a global
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hypertext space be created in which any network-accessible information could
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be refered to by a single "Universal Document Identifier". Given the go-ahead
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to experiment by my boss, Mike Sendall, I wrote in 1990 a program called
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"WorldWideWeb", a point and click hypertext editor which ran on the "NeXT"
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machine. This, together with the first Web server, I released to the High
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Energy Physics community at first, and to the hypertext and NeXT communities
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in the summer of 1991. Also available was a "line mode" browser by student
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Nicola Pellow, which could be run on almost any computer. The specifications
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of UDIs (now URIs), HyperText Markup Language (HTML) and HyperText Transfer
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Protocol (HTTP) published on the first server in order to promote wide
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adoption and discussion.</p>
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<p>The dream behind the Web is of a common information space in which we
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communicate by sharing information. Its universality is essential: the fact
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that a hypertext link can point to anything, be it personal, local or global,
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be it draft or highly polished. There was a second part of the dream, too,
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dependent on the Web being so generally used that it became a realistic
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mirror (or in fact the primary embodiment) of the ways in which we work and
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play and socialize. That was that once the state of our interactions was on
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line, we could then use computers to help us analyse it, make sense of what
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we are doing, where we individually fit in, and how we can better work
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together.</p>
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<p>The first three years were a phase of persuasion, aided by my colleague
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and first convert Robert Cailliau, to get the Web adopted. We needed Web
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clients for other platforms (as the NeXT was not ubiquitous) and browsers
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Erwise, Viola, Cello and Mosaic eventually came on the scene. We needed seed
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servers to provide incentive and examples, and all over the world inspired
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people put up all kinds of things.</p>
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<p>Between the summers of 1991 and 1994, the load on the first Web server
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("info.cern.ch") rose steadily by a factor of 10 every year. In 1992
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academia, and in 1993 industry, was taking notice. I was under pressure to
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define the future evolution. After much discussion I decided to form the
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World Wide Web Consortium in September 1994, with a base at MIT is the USA,
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INRIA in France, and now also at Keio University in Japan. The Consortium is
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a neutral open forum where companies and organizations to whom the future of
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the Web is important come to discuss and to agree on new common computer
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protocols. It has been a center for issue raising, design, and decision by
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consensus, and also a fascinating vantage point from which to view that
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evolution.</p>
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<p>With the dramatic flood of rich material of all kinds onto the Web in the
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1990s, the first part of the dream is largely realized, although still very
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few people in practice have access to intuitive hypertext creation tools. The
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second part has yet to happen, but there are signs and plans which make us
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confident. The great need for information about information, to help us
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categorize, sort, pay for, own information is driving the design of languages
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for the web designed for processing by machines, rather than people. The web
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of human-readable document is being merged with a web of
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machine-understandable data. The potential of the mixture of humans and
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machines working together and communicating through the web could be
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immense.</p>
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<p>1998/05/07</p>
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<hr>
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<p><a href="Overview.html">Back to main Bio</a></p>
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</body>
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</html>
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