History of the Web

Sir Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web in 1989.

Image: CERN

Sir Tim Berners-Lee is a British computer scientist. He was born in London, and his parents were
early computer scientists, working on one of the earliest computers.

Growing up, Sir Tim was interested in trains and had a model railway in his bedroom. He recalls:

I made some electronic gadgets to control the trains. Then I ended up getting more interested in
electronics than trains. Later on, when I was in college I made a computer out of an old
television set.

After graduating from Oxford University, Berners-Lee became a software engineer at CERN, the
large particle physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland. Scientists come from all over the
world to use its accelerators, but Sir Tim noticed that they were having difficulty sharing
information.

In those days, there was different information on different computers, but you had to log on to
different computers to get at it. Also, sometimes you had to learn a different program on each
computer. Often it was just easier to go and ask people when they were having coffee, Tim
says.

Tim thought he saw a way to solve this problem one that he could see could also have much
broader applications. Already, millions of computers were being connected together through the
fast-developing Internet and Berners-Lee realised they could share information by exploiting an
emerging technology called hypertext.

In March 1989, Tim laid out his vision for what would become the Web in a document called
Information Management: A Proposal. Believe it or not, Tims initial proposal was not
immediately accepted. In fact, his boss at the time, Mike Sendall, noted the words Vague but
exciting on the cover. The Web was never an official CERN project, but Mike managed to give
Tim time to work on it in September 1990. He began work using a NeXT computer, one of Steve
Jobs early products.
Tims original proposal. Image: CERN

By October of 1990, Tim had written the three fundamental technologies that remain the
foundation of todays Web (and which you may have seen appear on parts of your Web browser):

HTML: HyperText Markup Language. The markup (formatting) language for the Web.

URI: Uniform Resource Identifier. A kind of address that is unique and used to identify
to each resource on the Web. It is also commonly called a URL.

HTTP: Hypertext Transfer Protocol. Allows for the retrieval of linked resources from
across the Web.

Tim also wrote the first Web page editor/browser (WorldWideWeb.app) and the first Web
server (httpd). By the end of 1990, the first Web page was served on the open internet, and in
1991, people outside of CERN were invited to join this new Web community.

As the Web began to grow, Tim realised that its true potential would only be unleashed if anyone,
anywhere could use it without paying a fee or having to ask for permission.

He explains: Had the technology been proprietary, and in my total control, it would probably
not have taken off. You cant propose that something be a universal space and at the same time
keep control of it.
So, Tim and others advocated to ensure that CERN would agree to make the underlying code
available on a royalty-free basis, for ever. This decision was announced in April 1993, and
sparked a global wave of creativity, collaboration and innovation never seen before. In 2003, the
companies developing new Web standards committed to a Royalty Free Policy for their work. In
2014, the year we celebrated the Webs 25th birthday, almost two in five people around the world
were using it.

Tim moved from CERN to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1994 to found the World
Wide Web Consortium (W3C), an international community devoted to developing open Web
standards. He remains the Director of W3C to this day.

The early Web community produced some revolutionary ideas that are now spreading far beyond
the technology sector:

Decentralization: No permission is needed from a central authority to post anything on

the Web, there is no central controlling node, and so no single point of failure and no
kill switch! This also implies freedom from indiscriminate censorship and surveillance.

Non-discrimination: If I pay to connect to the internet with a certain quality of service,

and you pay to connect with that or a greater quality of service, then we can both
communicate at the same level. This principle of equity is also known as Net Neutrality.

Bottom-up design: Instead of code being written and controlled by a small group of
experts, it was developed in full view of everyone, encouraging maximum participation
and experimentation.

Universality: For anyone to be able to publish anything on the Web, all the computers
involved have to speak the same languages to each other, no matter what different
hardware people are using; where they live; or what cultural and political beliefs they
have. In this way, the Web breaks down silos while still allowing diversity to flourish.

Consensus: For universal standards to work, everyone had to agree to use them. Tim and
others achieved this consensus by giving everyone a say in creating the standards,
through a transparent, participatory process at W3C.

New permutations of these ideas are giving rise to exciting new approaches in fields as diverse as
information (Open Data), politics (Open Government), scientific research (Open Access),
education, and culture (Free Culture). But to date we have only scratched the surface of how
these principles could change society and politics for the better.

In 2009, Sir Tim established the World Wide Web Foundation. The Web Foundation is advancing
the Open Web as a means to build a just and thriving society by connecting everyone, raising
voices and enhancing participation.
Please do explore our site and our work. We hope youll be inspired by our vision and decide to
take action. Remember, as Tim tweeted during the Olympics Opening Ceremony in 2012, This
is for Everyone.

Weaving the web

Then, in 1980, I took a brief software consulting job with CERN, the famous European Particle
1

Physics Laboratory in Geneva. That's where I wrote Enquire, my first weblike program. I wrote it in my
spare time and for my personal use, and for no loftier reason than to help me remember the
connections among the various people, computers, and projects at the lab. Still, the larger vision had
taken firm root in my consciousness.
Suppose all the information stored on computers everywhere were linked I thought. Suppose I
could program my computer to create a space in which anything could be linked to anything. All the
bits of information in every computer at CERN, and on the planet, would be available to me and to
anyone else. There would be a single, global information space.
Once a bit of information in that space was labeled with an address, I could tell my computer to get it.
By being able to reference anything with equal ease, a computer could represent associations between
things that might seem unrelated but somehow did, in fact, share a relationship. A web of information
would form.

Berners-Lees fundamental vision

for the Web is about anything being
potentially connected to anything
else. Once someone has posted
material to the Web, that material
should be accessible, subject to
authorization, by anyone, with any
type of computer, in any country.
Further, it should be possible
to link to anything on the Web
so that others can find it. It is
crucial to Berners-Lees vision that
the Web remain decentralized: a
new person can start to use it
without asking for access from
anyone else, and a new user can
use the Web in any way he or she
prefers. Ego-surfing (looking for
occurrences of ones own name)
is as much a right as medical
research aimed at saving lives.

In 1994, Berners-Lee moved

to the MIT Laboratory for
Computer Science, where he
founded the World Wide Web
Consortium (W3C). The work
of W3C focuses on developing
common protocols to enhance the evolution of the Web, and
written into the W3C constitution
is the stipulation that the software
it produces in support of its
work be available to the public.
Anyone can join in the testing
of new protocols by downloading
tools from the consortiums site:
http://www.w3.org/

The thorny issues of security

and quality of information on
the Web are central subjects.
Berners-Lee argues that Public
Key Cryptography (PKC) offers a
way to achieve four basic aspects
of Web security: authenticity,
confidentiality, integrity of
messages, and nonrepudiability.
PKC provides a form of encryption
in which an outgoing message
is scrambled according to the
receivers public key; the message
can only be decoded by a receiver
who has the unique matching
private key to unlock it. Since its
development more than twenty
years ago, the United States
Government has blocked the
export of strong cryptography
by classifying it as munition.
In Berners-Lees view, PKC is
a technology for implementing
trust on the Web, for ensuring
that people are who they say they
are so that information can be
trusted and electronic transactions
enabled.
On another aspect of privacy,
Berners-Lees position is that
people should be able to surf
the Web anonymously or as a
defined entity, and they should
be able to control the difference between the two. W3C is creating
a Web-shopping technology that
will allow automatic negotiation
between a shoppers browser and
a stores server, leading to an
agreement about privacy. The
Platform for Privacy Preferences
Project (P3P) will give a computer
a way of describing its owners
privacy preferences and demands,
while it gives servers a way of
describing their privacy policies,
all implemented so that machines
can understand each other and
negotiate any differences.
On the subject of quality
of information, specifically
objectionable content,
Berners-Lee is a strong opponent
of government censorship. The
Consortium has developed the
Platform for Internet Content
Selection (PICS) protocol to allow
parents to select content for their
children on the basis of an open
set of criteria. A program can
be installed on any browser that
lets parents block the display of
sites that carry a pre-selected
rating. Berners-Lee argues that
government censorship is not so
effective as software filtering tools.
A nations laws can restrict only
in that country; filters can block
content no matter where it comes
from on the Web, and they can
block content for users who object to it without removing the material
from the Web. With PICS, people
can customize their own objectives
without imposing them on others.
The ultimate destiny of the
World Wide Web referred to in
the title will require substantial
technological advances. The Web
of the future will reside in a world
in which a computer screen is
available wherever we want it and
where access is permanent. The
experience of using a computer will
be more like getting out a pen than
getting out a lawnmower. While
the Web is now a medium in which
a few publish and most browse,
Berners-Lees vision is for a time in
which sharing what you know or
think is as easy as learning what
someone else knows or thinks.
He believes that the Web of the
future will facilitate more powerful
collaboration between people and
also between computers.
For the Web to become a better
place for human collaboration,
we need schemes for strong
authentication of group members,
good hypertext editors, annotation
systems similar to paper sticky
notes, and tools for procedures
such as online voting and review.
For the Web to become a better
place for computer collaboration, Berners-Lee envisions the
Semantic Web. Very little of the
information on the present Web
is in a form that machines can
naturally understand or process
meaningfully. The first step to
creating the Semantic Web is to
put data on the Web in a form
that machines can naturally
understand. The Consortium is
addressing this challenge with
development work on Resource
Description Framework (RDF), a
framework for using XML for data
rather than just for documents.
If HTML and the Web made all
online documents look like one
huge book, the Semantic Web
will, in this vision, make all the
documents in the world look like
one huge database.
Despite the claim in his title,
Berners-Lee makes it clear that he
did not do all the work. He credits
Vannevar Bush, Ted Nelson, and
Douglas Englebart (among others)
with hitting on similar concepts.
He happened to come along, he
writes, with the time, the right
interest, and the inclinationafter
hypertext and the Internet had
come of age. Weaving the Web is a
lively account of the growth of the
Web and a challenging speculation
about the potential of the Web to
contribute more to the solution of
human problems.

Frequently asked questions

I feel that after a while if I answer the same questions again, I will start answering rather
mechanically, and will forget important steps, and after a while it won't make sense. So I have
put a few answers from my outgoing mail in this list to save everyone time. But this list is (c)
TBL so don't quote directly in the press without permission. Do feel free to quote for school
projects. If you are doing a school project, I have a special page of questions that people tend to
ask for reports. Thanks.

Roles at MIT, W3C and Southampton?

Spam - "Please stop sending it to me"! (2002/4)

I have this great new idea - changing the world

What's happening? (2000)

What about peer-peer file sharing?

 General questions 1999

General questions 1998

o Q: I understand you invented the Internet....

o Q: What is the difference between the Net and the Web?

o What did you have in mind when you first developed the Web?

Examples of early WWW hypertext

o What was the first web page?

Physics: why and influence

W3C and standards (1996)

What computer do you use?

Robert Cailliau's role

Where exactly did you work at CERN?>

Spelling of WWW

Why the //, #, etc?

What were the first browsers?

What influenced the design of the web?

Why is your email address on my screen?

Can you tell me more about your personal life?

Please update your address book at (site)

Q: I'm updating my address book entries on (some site which shares contact information). Could
you log on and update your address book, please? Then we can keep in touch and easily track
changes to each other's addresses.
A: No, I have a FOAF file. Do you? Why should I have to get an account at every site which
keeps a record of me? That's not using the web. In fact I have that information on the web as
data. A URI for me is

http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/card#i

That is available in RDF, the W3C standard for generic data interchange, as card.rdf, and also on
Notation3 at card.n3. You can use programs like the tabulator or Foafnaut for reading FOAF
files, and various sites index then in various ways.

You will notice that my FOAF page has links to information about my organization, whose URI
is http://www.w3.org/data#W3C, and the page http://www.w3.org/data has links to the W3C
publications and organizational structure and so on.

If you are updating your address book, please take the time to publish a FOAF page. (PS: Plaxo
says it supports FOAf but I don't know how well) If you join the Opera community, or
LiveJornal, you get a FOAF page automatically.

Roles at W3C, MIT and Southampton?

(2004) When I moved to MIT from CERN in 1994, it was to start the World Wide Web
Consortium and act as its Director. Since then, my time has been split between the various tasks
that involves, and, once the W3C was running smoothly, also forward-looking research into the
future of decentralized systems like the Web and specifically the Web of machine-processsable
data, the "Semantic Web". In 2002, Steve Bratt joined W3C as Chief Operating Officer and in
2006 was named CEO, which made that part of my life much easier, and made W3C run very
much more effectively. In 2004, I also accepted a part-time post at Southampton University in
the UK. Southampton is one of the leading sites in Semantic Web research in the UK. While this
will take a fairly limited amount of my time, I hope it will help collaboration between MIT and
Southampton, and it will allow me to help Southampton and MIT to plan future research
directions.

My roles as W3C Director and resarcher at CSAIL continue. With Steve in the CEO position, I
can emphasize the technical side of my work such as that with the W3C Technical Architecture
Group.

Spam - "please stop sending it to me!"

This question is one I have started (2002/04) getting more and more frequently. It is (ironically)
normally sent automatically by people who are so enraged by spam (unsolicited bulk commercial
email) that they try to find some way to protest to someone who will be able to stop the
spammers. Most self-respecting Internet Service Providers will terminate their contract with
anyone who abuses the service. So it is a reasonable to take that approach. So these people
generally set up a program to check through the email to find the web page it points to.
Spammers are always after people's money, so there is some pointer to a web site which will
(indirectly) take it. The plan is basically that these folk search the email message for pointers to
web sites, and then search the domain name information to find out who is responsible for that
domain. They then try to email someone "upstream" who will cut off the spammer's email
access.

If you are one of these people, and you end up mailing me (timbl@w3.org) it is probably because
I am one of the contacts for www.w3.org. Why do you find www.w3.org? Because you search
the hypertext (HTML) email too simplistically and you found the XML namespace identifier
which defines the HTML language. This is a NOT a hypertext link. It identifies the specification
of the language in which the email is written. The identifier in www.w3.org space is there
because the World Wide Web consortium is the body which defines HTML. So w3.org has
nothing to do with the sender of the spam. So if you vent your frustration on me, it just shows the
software you are using is broken.

By the way, I don't know whether the technique works. I have a horrible feeling that the
spammers will just revel in the feedback they get from this. But I don't know. Check out
abuse.net from which I have got some of these. I am not mad at you for trying to stop spam. I am
mad at those who spammed you. For the record:

I hate spam.

I and my staff waste a significant amount of time deleting spam.

I feel that those who make their living sending spam damage the whole community for
the sake of greed.

The lie "you are only getting this because you have been signed up for it" makes me sick.

My handling change for unsolicited bulk email is $10,000 plus recovery costs and legal
fees.

I would support legislation which made it illegal to to falsify or omit the full
identification of those responsible for any commercial mail.

I believe that the falsification of email headers for one's own gain and other's loss is
fraudulent.

See also:

W3C webmaster FAQ on this issue

I have a great idea -Changing the world

Q: I have been working for a long time on a very special and new idea which will revolutionize
computing. Can I tell you about it?
A: This is the most difficult answer to have to write. I am sorry to say that I can't give your
vision of the future the time it would take to compare it with existing architectures and point out
the similarities and dissimilarities. I get quite a few requests like this. What I would humbly
suggest (and only suggest) is that you do that comparison piecemeal, and - while keeping your
vision in mind -- try to find the first piece to implement in the move toward what you envisage.
The world is can only really be changed one piece at a time. The art is picking that piece.

When you have, then use the web to find out who is working in that area. Acquaint yourself with
the vocabulary they use for talking about it. Find a way of explaining your novel idea in their
terms, after you have understood why it has not already been done your way. Then suggest that
change. If it is an idea in computing, then you may want to write the code to show that it works
first.

(I didn't find lots of people willing to get excited about the idea of the web. They quite
reasonably asked to know why it was different from the past, or other hypertext systems. In
retrospect, it was mainly that the decentralized database is removed, allowing the system to
scale, but allowing for dangling links. But it took a long time for that to surface as the novelty.)

What's happening? 2000

Q: What sort of technology should the forward-looking geeks in my company be looking at?

A: You probably have a lot of people using XML by now. You should have someone looking at
the next level - RDF. Tell them not to worry about the syntax, but check out the model. This is a
question of looking the data your company is storing and transferring, and making sure that it
can be represented in that simple circles-and-arrows RDF way. This is very simple. An important
trick is that you use URIs to identify the arrows as well as the circles. Doing this homework will
ensure that you have a well-defined data model, which will allow you data to be combined,
merged with any other RDF-model data. It will mean you will be able to multiply the power of
separate application areas by running RDF queries and new RDF-based applications across both
areas. It will mean that you will be there with talent which understands the basic model as the
Semantic Web becomes all-important.

Other things to watch: SVG - Scalable Vector Graphics - at last, graphics which can be rendered
optimally on all sizes of device. The user interface world is rapidly becoming competent at voice
input and output and W3C has standards in that area coming along. XML Signature will let you
to digitally sign XML documents - find out how. But in general, always check out the W3C
home page for what's new.

If your company/organization/self is a W3C member, then your Advisory Committee

representative has the task of understanding everything which is happening in W3C, and
everything in your company, and seeing where they should be introduced.

What do you think of peer-peer file sharing? (2000)

Q: What do you think about the peer-peer file sharing technology which allows people t copy
copyrighted information so easily?

A: The issue is not simple - so I try to put my thoughts into a few words. In general, the way to
make a sane society is to enact and enforce laws rather than to ban a given generic technology. (I
would make the exception for things which are specifically designed to harm such as guns and
nuclear bombs.) That said, one can make technology which supports our social and legal
frameworks better if one does it deliberately. One of the four domains of the World Wide Web
Consortium addresses Technology and Society for this reason. For example, in this case, I think
we really need standards for encoding the broad licensing terms of material so it can be read and
handled automatically. Then we can see, when the technology allows one to see whether
information is free or for pay, whether there is still a substantial problem of theft. The basic idea
of forwarding copies automatically between machines is a technical optimization of the
distribution protocol which is very useful and should not of itself be disallowed just because it --
like many powerful things -- can be abused. I'd point out that some ostensibly "peer-peer"
systems are centralized system in fact, allowing centralized control and profit by the central
server's owners. Other systems are really decentralized, having no central server. These are like
internet news groups which have been around for ages and which raised similar issues.

General Questions, 1999

Q: What is your opinion on 'Cyber Squatting' for domain names? (-Lia Kim)

A: Domain names are a scarce resource - one of the few scarce resources in cyberspace. I have
little sympathy for those who scoop these up with the hope of speculating on their value. This is
not one of the most helpful activities on the net. There are those who use their energy for the
purposes of furthering the technology or the content or the world in some way, but just sitting on
a domain name without using it in order to cash in later does not seem to me a constructive .

General Questions, 1998

Q: I understand you invented the Internet....

A: Sorry, not me! I was lucky enough to invent the Web at the time when the Internet already
existed - and had for a decade and a half. If you are looking for fathers of the Internet, try Vint
Cerf and Bob Kahn who defined the "Internet Protocol" (IP) by which packets are sent on from
one computer to another until they reach their destination. See:

"Cerf's Up" : MCI WorldCom on technology" with profile and FAQs by Vint, who
currently works for MCI.

Vint explains the timing:

"The DESIGN of Internet was done in 1973 and published in 1974. There ensued about 10 years
of hard work, resulting in the roll out of Internet in 1983. Prior to that, a number of
demonstrations were made of the technology - such as the first three-network interconnection
demonstrated in November 1977 linking SATNET, PRNET and ARPANET in a path leading
from Menlo Park, CA to University College London and back to USC/ISI in Marina del Rey,
CA."

David Clark, of MIT's LCS, is another one I can point to who put in the work in the 1970s which
made the Web possible in the 1990s.

Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn used, in making IP, the concept of packet switching which had been
invented by Paul Barran.

It is also good to mention the Domain Name Service upon which the web relies heavily. The
protocols which make the DNS work were pioneered and standardized by Paul Mockapetris.

Q: What is the difference between the Net and the Web?

A: The Internet ('Net) is a network of networks. Basically it is made from computers and cables.
What Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn did was to figure out how this could be used to send around little
"packets" of information. As Vint points out, a packet is a bit like a postcard with a simple
address on it. If you put the right address on a packet, and gave it to any computer which is
connected as part of the Net, each computer would figure out which cable to send it down next
so that it would get to its destination. That's what the Internet does. It delivers packets -
anywhere in the world, normally well under a second.

Lots of different sort of programs use the Internet: electronic mail, for example, was around long
before the global hypertext system I invented and called the World Wide Web ('Web). Now,
videoconferencing and streamed audio channels are among other things which, like the Web,
encode information in different ways and use different languages between computers
("protocols") to provide a service.

The Web is an abstract (imaginary) space of information. On the Net, you find computers -- on
the Web, you find document, sounds, videos,.... information. On the Net, the connections are
cables between computers; on the Web, connections are hypertext links. The Web exists because
of programs which communicate between computers on the Net. The Web could not be without
the Net. The Web made the net useful because people are really interested in information (not to
mention knowledge and wisdom!) and don't really want to have know about computers and
cables.

Questions below derived from those asked by Taiwan's Commonwealth magazine

Q: What did you have in mind when you first developed the Web?

From A Short Personal History of the Web:

A: The dream behind the Web is of a common information space in which we communicate by
sharing information. Its universality is essential: the fact that a hypertext link can point to
anything, be it personal, local or global, be it draft or highly polished. There was a second part of
the dream, too, dependent on the Web being so generally used that it became a realistic mirror (or
in fact the primary embodiment) of the ways in which we work and play and socialize. That was
that once the state of our interactions was on line, we could then use computers to help us
analyze it, make sense of what we are doing, where we individually fit in, and how we can better
work together.

Q: Do you have had mixed emotions about "cashing in" on the Web?

A: Not really. It was simply that had the technology been proprietary, and in my total control, it
would probably not have taken off. The decision to make the Web an open system was necessary
for it to be universal. You can't propose that something be a universal space and at the same time
keep control of it.

Q: Are you happy with what the World Wide Web has turned out so far?

A: That is a big question. I am very happy at the incredible richness of material on the Web, and
in the diversity of ways in which it is being used. There are many parts of the original dream
which are not yet implemented. For example, very few people have and easy, intuitive tool for
putting their thoughts into hypertext. And many of the reasons for, and meaning of, links on the
web is lost. But these can, and I think will, change.

Q: What do you think of the commercial turf wars going on the Web?

A: There has always been a huge competition to come out with the best Web technology. This
has followed from the fact that the standards, being open, allow anyone to experiment with new
extensions. This produces the threat of fragmentation into many Webs, and that threat brings the
companies to the W3C to agree about how to go forward together. It is the tension of this
competition and the need for standards which drives W3C forward at such a speed.

Q: What should the lay person be aware of as the Web evolves?

A: We should all learn to be information smart: to understand when a Web site, or a piece of
software, or an Internet Service provider plan, is giving us biased information. We should learn
to distinguish quality information and quality links. As technology evolves, and machine-
understandable information on the Web becomes available, we should be aware of the sudden
changes which large-scale machine processing might have on our businesses.

Q: How could the Web be a more interactive, creative medium?

A: Nothing can be perfect, but the Web could be a lot better. It would help if we had easy
hypertext editors which let us make links between documents with the mouse. It would help if
everyone with Web access also had some space they can write to -- and that is changing
nowadays as a lot of ISPs give web space to users. It would help if we had an easy way of
controlling access to files on the web so that we could safely use it for private, group, or family
information without fear of the wrong people being able to access it.
Metadata

Q: You talked about the need for a metadata language. Can you tell us laymen what it is?

A: "Meta" is used with anything which is about itself - so a metabook would be a book about
books, and metadata is data about data. On the Web, this means all sorts of information about
information: its ownership, authorship, distribution rights, privacy policy, and so on. These needs
are driving us to make ways of putting information on the web designed for computers to be able
to understand. Web pages at the moment in HTML are designed to be read by humans. In the
future, some Web pages will be in "RDF" -- Resource Description Framework. This will be read
by computer programs which will help us organize ourselves and our data and possibly
everything we do.

Privacy

Q: Are you worried about privacy on the Web?

A: When it comes to privacy, my personal view is that the consumer needs some legal or
regulatory protection by default. The W3C has a project called "P3P" for privacy which will
allow a user to control if and how information is given away to a Web server. P3P will allow Web
sites to specify their privacy policy and users to automatically be warned about sites whose
policies they don't like. See the P3P project.

ECommerce

Q. Do you shop online? What do you think about the E-Commerce?

A: Yes, I buy a lot of things online myself. I think that Web shopping as it is is only the tip of a
huge larger change which will come when I can find things and compare prices automatically,
and when electronic financial instruments are commonplace.

Web and Education

Q: Peter Drucker has predicted that information technology will bring about the demise of the
university as currently constituted. Do you share this view? What changes will the Web help
bring to education?

A: I hope that educators will pool their resources and create a huge supply of online materials. I
hope much of this will be available freely to those especially in developing countries who may
not have access to it any other way. Then I think we will see two things. One will be that keeping
that web of material up to date will take a lot of time and effort - it will seem like more effort
than creating it in the first place. The other is that we will see how essential people, and their
wisdom, and their personal interactions, are to the educational process. A university is a lot more
than its library.

The effect of the Web on how we work

Q: How do you see the web shape the new, knowledge-based economy?

A: The Web is simply a name for all the information you can get online. So it will be the abstract
place where the knowledge-based economy happens. Already the W3C staff team works with
three international sites, many offices, and several people working from or near home. The Web
will open up new forms of business altogether, and make us rethink the way we run existing
businesses. It can turn bureaucracy over to machines, and let people get on with the creativity. It
will help us see where we each fit, with our own experience, talents and passions, among the
millions of other people and theirs. It can help us work together more effectively, remove
misunderstanding, and bring about peace and harmony on a global scale. But it can only do these
things is we learn to use it wisely, and we think very carefully about both the technology and the
laws we make or change around it.

Examples of early WWW hypertext

Q: What was the first web page?

A: Apart from local "file:" URLs on my machine (which was the first browser as well as the first
server), the first http one (end of 1990) was basically

http://nxoc01.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html

An alias was made so that this was later known as

http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html

It is not now (alas) served but a later (1992) copy of the original pages exists at
http://www.w3.org/History/19921103-hypertext/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html

Q: Do you have any examples of the early Web which we could compare with the current Web?

A: (1997): I don't have a very early 1990,91 snapshot but there is a snapshot of our web as of
November 1992, much of which dates from earlier. (Some pages for some reason don't work
with Netscape 3.0 for some reason it doesn't the old HTML for some reason or perhaps it just has
a bug. They do work with Internet explorer 4.0)

There is a list of design issues and a trip report on the 1990 European Conference on HyperText
and a note on the "state of standardization" (!) and an example of the use of the web as a
collaborative tool in some shared notes on the topology of the web I wrote and Jean-Francois
Groff annotated .

The pages will look much the same as they did originally, although the actual style sheet I used
as a default with the original browser/editor you can see converted approximately into a CSS
style sheet if you read my Style Guide for Online Hypertext with a CSS-compliant browser such
as IE 4.0.
Some of the links in the historical stuff have been accidentally saved (much later) incorrect
absolute links -- if you really want to follow them you can see where they ought to have gone by
stripping of the prefix.

Physics: why and influence

(Based on replies to David Brake, "New Scientist",1997/9)

Q: Why did you study physics?

A (1997) : My parents are both mathematicians: they actually met while working on the Ferranti
Mark I, the first computer sold commercially. My mother has been dubbed the "first commercial
computer programmer" as she went with the machine when it was installed on the customer site.
So we played with 5 hole paper tape, and learned to enjoy mathematics wherever it cropped up,
and learned that it cropped up everywhere.

Later on, my hobby was electronics. When I left school, obviously I was going to do something
in maths, science and/or engineering. Emanuel school was programmed to send people to
Oxford, where the subjects are very narrow. I took physics thinking it would be a sort of
compromise between maths and electronics, theory and practice. It turned out not to be that, but
to be something special and wonderful in itself. Physics was fun, and in fact a good preparation
for creating a global system. In physics, you learn to think up some simple mathematical rule on
a microscopic scale, which when scaled will explain the macroscopic behavior. On the Internet,
we try to dream up computer protocols which when extrapolated to the macroscopic will produce
an information space with properties we would like.

Q: Why didn't you stay on to do a PhD in physics?

A: After undergraduate physics, you have a reasonable training in logical thought and common
sense, an ounce of philosophy and not enough maths to study physics. I didn't meet anyone who
was actually doing physics research at the postgrad level and was really excited about it. I might
have been more tempted to take a PhD if I had had a role model who did have that excitement.

What seemed much more exciting was the possibility of that electronic hobby really taking off.
The microprocessor was just hitting the world. I got an early M6800 evaluation kit, and built
myself a rack-based 8-bit system. I had already while in college slowly put together a display
unit out of an old TV, bits of TTL logic and junk from the Tottenham Court Road. I joined
Plessey Data Systems: of the telecom companies doing the "milk round" interviews the Poole
(Dorset) site won hands down in terms of the sea and the countryside!

Those who got into designing microprocessor hardware and software then rode the crest of the
wave of the deployment of microprocessor technology. Compared with TTL, a microprocessor
gave one that feeling of unbounded opportunity which had everyone excited. Later, the thought
of building an abstract information space on top of it all had the same sort of kick.
W3C and standards, 1996
Q: What role does the W3C play in setting standards?

A: (1996) W3C's mission is to realize the full potential of the web, by bringing its members and
others together in a neutral forum. The W3C has to move rapidly (time measured in "web years"
= 2.6 months) so it cannot afford to have a traditional Standards process. What has happened to
date has been that W3C has, by providing a neutral forum and facilitation, and also with the help
of its technically astute staff, got a consensus among the developers about a way to go. Then, this
has been all that has been needed: once a common specification has been prepared and a general
consensus among the experts is seen, companies have been running with that ball. The
specifications have become de facto standards. This has happened with for example HTML
TABLES, and PICS. Now in fact we have decided to start using not a full standards process, but
a process of formal review by the W3C membership, in order to draw attention to specifications,
and to cement their status a little. After review by members, the specifications will be known as
W3C process.

(See process of review)

Q:What do you make of the branding attempt of companies, by putting little icons on their home
pages saying, "best when viewed with Microsoft Explorer, or Navigator?"

A: This comes from an anxiousness to use the latest proprietary features which have not been
agreed by all companies. It is done either by those who have an interest in pushing a particular
company, or it is done by those who are anxious to take the community back to the dark ages of
computing when a floppy from a PC wouldn't read on a Mac, and a Wordstar document wouldn't
read in Word Perfect, or an EBCDIC file wouldn't read on an ASCII machine. It's fine for
individuals whose work is going to be transient and who aren't worried about being read by
anyone.

However, corporate IT strategists should think very carefully about committing to the use of
features which will bind them into the control of any one company. The web has exploded
because it is open. It has developed so rapidly because the creative forces of thousands of
companies are building on the same platform. Binding oneself to one company means one is
limiting one's future to the innovations that one company can provide.

Q: What role do standards play in today's hyper competitive, and fast-changing marketplace?

A: Common specifications are essential. This competition, which is a great force toward
innovation, would not be happening if it were not building on a base of HTTP, URL and HTML
standards. These forces are strong. They are the forces which, by their threat to tear the web apart
into fragmented incompatible pieces, force companies toward common specifications.

Q:Is it overly ambitious to think standards can be set and adhered to? Are they a relic of a
kinder, gentler era?
A: Do you think that incompatibility, the impossibility of transferring information between
different machines, companies, operating systems, applications, was "kinder, gentler"? It was a
harsh, frustrating era. The Web has brought a kindness and gentleness for users, a confidence in
technology which is a balm for IT departments everywhere. It has bought new hope. As a result,
great things are happening very fast. So this is a faster, more exciting era.

Companies know that it is only interesting to compete over one feature until everyone can do it.
After that, that feature becomes part of the base, and everyone wants to do it in one, standard,
way. The smart companies are competing on the implementations: the many other aspects such
as functionality, speed, ease of use and support which differentiate products.

June 96

Machinery
Q: What sort of computer do you use?

A: (2002) A titanium G4 Powerbook running OS X and under X11 fink -installed stuff including
Amaya. I use a Nokia bluetooth 3670 tri-band GSM phone which has a low-res camera. The OS
X operating system is very similar to the NeXTStep operating system on which I developed the
WorldWideWeb program originally.

Robert Cailliau's role

Robert Cailliau also worked at CERN, in a different division from me. He was the first convert to
the web technology after Mike Sendall who originally let me start the project.

Robert put in huge amounts of time and effort into the WWW project. He tried to get official
funding for it from CERN. He looked for students who might be interested in working on it, and
found several, some of whom, like Henrik Frystyk Nielsen and Ari Luotonen, became famous
names in later WWW history. He would organize the details with management, and I would
technically supervise, though our offices were several minutes walk away across the site. (If
CERN had not been an international site, mine would have been on French soil and his on Swiss,
so we would have had to show our passports each time!)

Some commentators suggest that Robert co-invented the WWW. To set this straight, he did not
invent it. It wasn't his idea. He did not write the specifications for UDIs (later to be URLs, then
URIs), or for HTML, the hypertext language, nor HTTP, the protocol, or the code of the original
implementation. More than a year after my original proposal (March 1989), while I was working
on the code, he wrote a proposal to CERN proposing some staff be allocated to the project. This
was a brave thing to do, as CERN was always chronically short of manpower for the huge
challenges it had taken on. So Robert put himself out there to claim that effort on WWW was
worth it.
He pushed CERN's management, also, for them to give the WWW technology away without
royalties. This took 18 months, and a lot of nagging at the directorate level. This was hugely
important for the future of the WWW.

One cannot catalog in one place all the many many things Robert has done for the Web. One
thing which stands out was his organizing of the first WWW conference, at CERN, after a short
tussle with NCSA as to who should hold the first. Since then Robert was for many years
intimately involved wit the International WWW Conference series.

That's not to say either that Robert did not have a technical side. His negotiating for internet
access from a local university, and soldering up of the modem so that we could demonstrate the
WWW at the Hypertext conference in San Antonio was a great illustration of his spirit. He also
later wrote a browser for the Mac, his favorite platform. (Robert had passion for user interfaces
which people could actually use, and so the Mac and the Web both appealed). The browser,
called Samba, was an attempt to port the design of the original WWW browser, which I wrote on
the NeXT machine, onto the Mac platform, but was not ready before NCSA brought out the Mac
version of Mosaic, which eclipsed it.

Robert continued to speak on the subject of the web, promoting it, explaining it, and defending it,
for many years, and still does, though he has retired from CERN and the conference committee.
The early days of the web were very hand-to-mouth. So many things to do, such a delicate flame
to kep alive. Without Robert's energy and passion for it I cannot imagine that it could have taken
off as it did.

Where exactly did you work at CERN?

I wrote the proposal, and developed the code in CERN Building 31. I was on the second (in the
european sense) floor, if you come out of the elevator (a very slow freight elevator at the time
anyway) and turn immediately right you would then walk into one of the two offices I inhabited.
The two offices (which of course may have been rearranged since then) were different sizes: the
one to the left (a gentle R turn out of the elevator) benefitted from extra length as it was by
neither staircase nor elevator. The one to the right (or a sharp R turn out of the elevator) was
shorter and the one I started in. I shared it for a long time with Claude Bizeau. I think I wrote the
1989 memo there.

When I actually started work coding up the WWW code in September 1990, I moved into the
larger office. That is where I had the NeXT machine, as I remember it.

The second floor had pale grey linoleum, the first floor, where Peggie Rimmer had her office,
had red lino; the third floor had pale yellow lino. The ground floor had I think green lino. Also
on the second floor was the Documentation et Donnes, later Computing and Networking, HQ
with David Williams at one point heading it up.

Spelling of WWW
Q: How in fact do you spell World Wide Web?

A: It should be spelled as three separate words, so that its acronym is three separate "W"s. There
are no hyphens. Yes, I know that it has in some places been spelled with a hyphen but the official
way is without. Yes, I know that "worldwide" is a word in the dictionary, but World Wide Web is
three words.

I use "Web" with a capital W to indicate that it is an abbreviation for "World Wide Web". Hence,
"What a tangled web he wove on his Web site!".

Often, WWW is written and read as W3, which is quicker to say. In particular, the World Wide
Web consortium is W3C, never WWWC.

Q: Why did you call it WWW?

A: Looking for a name for a global hypertext system, an essential element I wanted to stress was
its decentralized form allowing anything to link to anything. This form is mathematically a
graph, or web. It was designed to be global of course. (I had noticed that projects find it useful to
have a signature letter, as the Zebra project at CERN which started all its variables with "Z". In
fact by the time I had decided on WWW, I had written enough code using global variables
starting with "HT" for hypertext that W wasn't used for that.). Alternatives I considered were
"Mine of information" ("Moi", c'est un peu egoiste) and "The Information Mine ("Tim", even
more egocentric!), and "Information Mesh" (too like "Mess" though its ability to describe a mess
was a requirement!). Karen Sollins at MIT now has a Mesh project.

Why the //, #, etc?

(2000/09) When I was designing the Web, I tried to use forms which people would recognize
from elsewhere.

Q: What is the history of the //?

A: I wanted the syntax of the URI to separate the bit which the web browser has to know about
(www.example.com) from the rest (the opaque string which is blindly requested by the client
from the server). Within the rest of the URI, slashes (/) were the clear choice to separate parts of
a hierarchical system, and I wanted to be able to make a link without having to know the name of
the service (www.example.com) which was publishing the data. The relative URI syntax is just
unix pathname syntax reused without apology. Anyone who had used unix would find it quite
obvious. Then I needed an extension to add the service name (hostname). In fact this was similar
to the problem the Apollo domain system had had when they created a network file system. They
had extended the filename syntax to allow //computername/file/path/as/usual. So I just copied
Apollo. Apollo was a brand of unix workstation. (The Apollo folks, who invented domain and
Apollo's Remote procedure call system later I think went largely to Microsoft, and rumor has it
that much of Microsoft's RPC system was).
I have to say that now I regret that the syntax is so clumsy. I would like
http://www.example.com/foo/bar/baz to be just written http:com/example/foo/bar/baz where the
client would figure out that www.example.com existed and was the server to contact. But it is too
late now. It turned out the shorthand "//www.example.com/foo/bar/baz" is rarely used and so we
could dispense with the "//".

Q: What about the "#"?

A: So, I needed something to separate the document (resource) from the thing (fragment) within
that document (or view of that document). In a snail mail address in the US at least, it is common
to use the number sign for an apartment number or suite number within a building. So 12 Acacia
Av #12 means "The building at 12 Acacia Av, and then within that the unit known numbered 12".
It seemed to be a natural character for the task. Now, http://www.example.com/foo#bar means
"Within resource http://www.example.com/foo, the particular view of it known as bar".

It turned out later that in fact another hypertext project of some sort in IBM, and Doug
Englebart's NLS system had both independently use "#" for this purpose. So there is something
to choosing a character for the way people think of it.

Ray Tomlinson, who invented email, tells a similar story of many years earlier choosing the "@"
for email - it made linguistic sense, as "at" was the english preposition which typically connects a
person and their address. Hence ray@example.com and so on.

What were the first WWW browsers?

WorldWideWeb

A: I wrote in 1990 the first GUI browser, and called it "WorldWideWeb". It ran on the NeXT
computer. (I much later renamed the application Nexus to avoid confusion between the first
client and the abstract space itself).

Screenshot of WorldWideWeb taken for a CACM article. By this time it had color and
inline images.The original 1990 version 1.0 would have looked identical except the book
icon and the CERN icon would have been in separate windows - and the whole thing
(like NeXT at the time) would have been in gray scale! The screen shot shows me making
a link from "Atlas" in a list of experiments to some marked page. Look - no typing URLS,
no <angle brackets>!

WorldWideWeb was a graphical point-and-click browser with mode-free editing and link
creation. It used style sheets, and multiple fonts, sizes, and justification styles. It would
download and display linked images, diagrams, sounds animations and movies from anything in
the large NeXTStep standard repertoire.

(Some have asked for pointers to the source code. I have found an archive directory including the
HyperText.m module which was the basis for the hypertext functionality. This code, like all my
WWW code and later W3C has always been publicly available. This archive has the code,
though the libwww code modules are soft links which no longer work. I haven't tried
recompiling and linking it for years - so it is probably of historical interest only)

More about the WorldWideWeb application

Viola

Pei Wei, student at U.C. Berkeley (not Stanford, as incorrectly reported earlier in a typo here),
then wrote ViolaWWW for unix, based on his Viola language; some students at Helsinki
University of Technology wrote "Erwise" for unix; and Tony Johnson of SLAC wrote "Midas"
for unix. Pei Wei has passed though history unnoticed among others whose work is not
mentioned in the histories, even though there was a year or so when Viola was the best way to
browse the web, was the engine driving the installation of new servers, and the recommended
browser at CERN for example.

Many people, incidentally, saw the Web for the first time by telnetting into info.CERN.ch,
which gave them a crude but functional line mode interface. This was the second browser, a text-
based browser, called the "line mode" browser, or "www", and written by CERN student Nicola
Pellow. Many people imagined that that was all there was to the web. As one journalist wrote
"The Web is a way of finding information by typing numbers" as links were numbered on the
page. It was only in the community of people who use NeXT computers that the Web could be
seen as a point-and-click space of hypertext.

Where does Mosaic fit in?

A: As I understand it, Marc Andreessen at NCSA was shown ViolaWWW by a colleague (David
Thompson?) at NCSA. Marc downloaded Midas and tried it out. He and Eric Bina then wrote
their own browser for unix from scratch. Later, several other folks at NCSA joined the team to
port the idea to Mac and PC. As they did, Tom Bruce at Cornell was writing "Cello" for the PC
which came out neck-and-neck with Mosaic on the PC.

Marc and Eric did a number of very important things. They made a browser which was easy to
install and use. They were the first one to get inline images working - to that point browsers had
had varieties of fonts and colors, but pictures were displayed in separate windows. This made
web pages much sexier. Most importantly, Marc followed up his and Eric's coding with very fast
24hr customer support, really addressing what it took to make the app easy and natural to use,
and trivial to install. Other apps had other things going for them. Viola, for example, was more
advanced in many ways, with downloaded applets and animations way back then - very like
HotJava was later. But Mosaic was the easiest step onto the Web for a beginner, and so was a
critical element of the Web explosion.

Marc marketed Mosaic hard on the net, and NCSA hard elsewhere, trying hard to brand the
WWW and "Mosaic": "I saw it on Mosaic" etc. When Marc and Jim Clark first started their start-
up they first capitalized on the Mosaic brand, but NCSA fought for it and won. When the
"Netscape" brand appeared, people realized the difference between the general "World Wide
Web"concept and specific software.
Start of the web: Influences
Q. Have your first ideas in regard to the Web been influenced by any specific work or published
paper like Vanevar Bush's "As we my think", a publication of Doug Engelbart or Ted Nelson?

A. There wasn't a direct line. I did come across Ted's work while I was working on the WWW --
after my "Enquire" program (1980) but during my reading up on hypertext - probably between
March 89 and September 1990. Not sure.. Of course by 1989 there was hypertext as a common
word, hypertext help everywhere, so Ted's basic idea had been (sort of) implemented and I came
across it though many indirect routes.

I came across Ted's name first of course. Then I ordered "Literary Machines", and I remember I
was late paying him as he didn't take credit cards or Swiss cheques - I paid him in August 1992,
in cash, in person in Sausolito.

I came across Vannevar Bush's article first in the documentation of Digital Equipment
Corporation's "Memex" project which became "Linkworks" for VMS. I don't remember when
that came out. Great paper.

Doug Englebart's work was the closest to the Web design -- when I saw that the first time I was
amazed. He had even used the hash sign as a delimiter for the address within a document (I guess
like me by analogy with an apartment number). Doug's stuff is unbelievable. You have best to
see the video of him demonstrating it or his demo of a recent smalltalk re-implementation. I saw
the latter at the Edinburg Hypertext conference ECHT 94.

Q: Any people who personally helped you get to where you are today?

A: I think the list would be too long to mention. Everyone who was fun and encouraging, starting
with my parents. On the professional side, here are a few:

The Maths teacher at Emanuel, Frank Grundy, who conveyed the excitement of the subject with
a twinkle of his eye, could make numerical approximations in his head faster than we could work
it out longhand, and would throw in a teaser question into his conversation to puzzle anyone who
thought they had figured the subject out. And Daffy Pennel who also couldn't contain his
excitement for Chemistry and anything related to it.

Unlike most people at Oxford I had one tutor for almost all the work. John Moffat has a vary rare
talent for being able to understand not only the physics itself, but also my tangled misguided
attempts at it, and then showing me in my terms using my strange symbols and vocabulary where
I had gone wrong. Many people can only explain the world from their own point of view.

At CERN, I was recruited by Peggie Rimmer who taught me, among other things, how to write a
standards document. Ben Segal was a mentor for my RPC project at CERN, and was a sole
evangelist for Internet protocols at CERN long before they were adopted. Ben gave me a lot of
moral support in the later WWW days too. A few years later, Mike Sendall was my boss who has
a great combination of human warmth and technical depth, and actually allowed me unofficially
to write the WWW programs. And then everyone across the Internet who thought the Web was a
neat idea and worked on it after hours actually built it.

On collaboration and automatability, Sept 95

The web today is a medium for communication between people, using computers as a largely
invisible part of the infrastructure. One of the long-term goals of the consortium is
"Automatability", the ability for computers to make some sense of the information and so help us
in our task. It has been the goal of mankind for so long that machines should help us in more
useful ways than they do at present, help us solve some of those human problems. Maybe this is
one of the many ideas (like hypertext) which the web's great scale will allow to work where it
did not achieve critical mass on a small scale before. So there are groups looking at a web of
knowledge representation. It could be that some scientific field will be the first to be sufficiently
disciplined to input its data not just as cool hypertext, but in a machine-readable form, allowing
programs to wander the globe analyzing and surmising.

The W3 Consortium started to address this goal with its recent workshop on Collaboration on the
Web. The ability of machines to process data on the web for scientific purposes such as checking
a scientist's private experimental data against public databases, require databases to be available
not only in a raw machine-readable form, but also labelled in a machine readable way as to what
they are.

The knowledge engineering field has to learn how to be global, and the web has to learn
knowledge engineering, but in the end this might be a way in which again the scientific field
leads the world into something very powerful, and a new paradigm shift.

March 95
Q: How did you come to arrive at the idea of WWW?

A: I arrived at the web because the "Enquire" (E not I) program -- short for Enquire Within Upon
Everything, named after a Victorian book of that name full of all sorts of useful advice about
anything -- was something I found really useful for keeping track of all the random associations
one comes across in Real Life and brains are supposed to be so good at remembering but
sometimes mine wouldn't. It was very simple but could track those associations which would
sometimes develop into structure as ideas became connected, and different projects become
involved with each other.

I was using Enquire myself, and realized that (a) it would fulfill my obligation to the world to
describe what I was doing if everyone else could get at the data, and (b) it would make it possible
for me to check out the other projects in the lab which I could chose to use or not if only their
designers had used Enquire and I had access.
Now, the first version of Enquire allowed you to make links between files (on one file system)
just as easily as between nodes within one file. (It stored many nodes in one database file). The
second version, a port from NORD to PC then VMS, would not allow external links.

This proved to be a debilitating problem. To be constrained into database enclosures was too
boring, not powerful enough. The whole point about hypertext was that (unlike most project
management and documentation systems) it could model a changing morass of relationships
which characterized most real environments I knew (and certainly CERN). Only allowing links
within distinct boxes killed that. One had to be able to jump from software documentation to a
list of people to a phone book to an organizational chart to whatever .. as you can with the web
today. The test rule was that if I persuaded two other projects to use it, and they described their
systems with it, and then later at any point a module, person etc., in one project used something
from another project, that you would be able to add the link and the two webs would become one
with no global change -- no "flag day" involving the merging of two databases into one, no
scaling problems as the number of connected things grew. Hence the W3 design.

The same lesson applies now to the webs of trust we will be building with linked certificates.

So the requirement was for "external" links to be just as easy to make as "internal" links. Which
meant that links had to be one way.

(There was also a requirement that the web should be really easy to add links to, but though that
was true in the prototype we are only now starting to see betas of good commercial web editors
now.)

June 94
This was an interview in Internet world by Kris Herbst. His questions are his (c) of course.
Slightly edited.

IW: What did you think of the first WWW'94 conference?

TBL: Great! It had a unique atmosphere, as there were people from all
walks of life brought together by their excitement about the Web. As it
was the first one, they hadn't met before, so it was a bit unique. It was
very oversubscribed, as you know, so the next one will have to be a lot
bigger.

IW: Can you tell us something about your early life, and how those
experiences might have influenced you later as you developed WWW?

TBL: That's the first time I've been asked to trace WWW history back
that far! I was born in London, England. My parents met while
developing the Ferranti Mark I, the first computer sold commercially,
and I grew up playing with five-hole paper tape and building
computers out of cardboard boxes. Could that have been an influence?
Later on I studied physics as a kind of compromise between
mathematics and engineering. As it turned out, it wasn't that
compromise, but it was something special in its own right. Nevertheless,
afterward I went straight into the IT industry where more things
seemed to be happening. So I can't really call myself a physicist.
But physicists spend a lot of time trying to relate macroscopic behavior
of systems to microscopic laws, and that is the essence of the design of
scalable systems. So physics was probably an influence.

IW: What led you to conceive the WWW?

TBL: I dabbled with a number of programs representing information in

a brain-like way. Some of the earlier programs were too abstract and led
to hopelessly undebuggable tangles. One more practical program was a
hypertext notebook I made for my own personal use when I arrived at
CERN. I found I needed it just to keep track of the -- how shall I say --
flexible? creative? -- way new parts of the system, people and modules
were added on and connected together. The project I'd worked on just
before starting WWW was a real-time remote procedure call, so that
gave me some networking background. Image Computer Systems did a
lot of work with text processing and communications -- I was a director
before coming to CERN.

IW: What elements in your background or character helped you to

conceive WWW as a way to keep track of what was happening at
CERN?

TBL: Elements of character?! Anyone who has lost track of time when
using a computer knows the propensity to dream, the urge to make
dreams come true, and the tendency to miss lunch. The former two
probably helped. I think they are called Attention Deficiency Disorder
now. ;-)

IW: Do you have some favorite Web sites for browsing?

TBL: (Sigh) I wish I did, but I hardly spend any time browsing.
Historically, I appreciate the people who were first and showed others
how things could be -- Franz Hoesel's Vatican Library, of course, Steve
Putz's map server, lots more.

IW: How do you feel about the fact that WWW promises to generate
large amounts of money for some persons?

TBL: If it's good, people will want to buy it, and money is they way
they vote on what they want. I believe that system is the best one we
have, so if it's right, sure people are going to make money. People will
make money building software, selling information, and more
importantly doing all kinds of "real" business, which happens to work
much better because the Web is there to make their work easier.
The web is like paper. It doesn't constrain what you use it for:
you have to be able to use it for all of the information flow of
normal life.
My priority is to see it develop and evolve in a
way which will hold us in good stead for a long future.
If I, and CERN, hadn't had that attitude,
there probably wouldn't be a web now.

Now, if someone tries to monopolize the Web, for example pushes

proprietary variations on network protocols, then that would
 make me unhappy.

More obscure questions...

Rendition of links

Q: I'm a student of visual communications and asked myself why links are blue. I found some
answers that might be, for example blue is a color of learning, but I'm not sure what is right. Is
there any reason, why links are colored blue ?

A: There is no reason why one should use color, or blue, to signify links: it is just a default. I
think the first WWW client (WorldWideWeb I wrote for the NeXT) used just underline to
represent link, as it was a spare emphasis form which isn't used much in real documents. Blue
came in as browsers went color - I don't remember which was the first to use blue. You can
change the defaults in most browsers, and certainly in HTML documents, and of course with
CSS style sheets. There are many examples of style sheets which use different colors.

My guess is that blue is the darkest color and so threatens the legibility least. I used green
whenever I could in the early WWW design, for nature and because it is supposed to be relaxing.
Robert Cailliau made the WWW icon in many colors but chose green as he had always seen W in
his head as green.

One of the nicest link renditions was Dave Raggett's "Arena" browser which had a textured
parchment background and embossed out the words of the link with a square apparently raised
area.

Why is your email address on my screen?

Q: I get on my connection screen something like

Keyword Decimal Description References

------- ------- ----------- ----------
http 80/tcp World Wide Web HTTP
http 80/udp World Wide Web HTTP
www 80/tcp World Wide Web HTTP
www 80/udp World Wide Web HTTP www-http
80/tcp World Wide Web HTTP www-http
80/udp World Wide Web HTTP # Tim Berners-Lee <timbl@W3.org>

Who are you and why are you there?

A: Your screen is showing you a list of services on the Internet. Service 80, for example, is
HTTP, the protocol which allows a web server and client to talk to each other. A web client opens
a TCP connection to a port number 80 on the server. It just happened that I designed HTTP and
asked for the port number to be assigned for computers everywhere to be able to use for the web.
So someone left my name and email against the entry at the time for the record. The hash (#)
tells your computer not to take any notice of that line. It is just historical. I am not hacking your
computer!

Can you tell me more about your personal life?

A: No, I can't - sorry. I like to keep work and personal life separate. What is on the web on this
page and my home page is all there is. Please do not email me asking for more information for
school projects, etc. Thank you for your understanding.
Where were you when you invented the WWW?

I was working in a physics laboratory called CERN. (CERN is in Geneva, Switzerland.

Switzerland is near the middle of Europe.)

At CERN, people study High Energy Physics. That is the physics of really really small particles -
particles much smaller than atoms. It turns out that if you want to investigate really really small
things, you need huge machines called accelerators to smash particles together really hard. Then
you have huge gadgets (about the size of a house) which detects what happens, and what bits fly
off, so you can figure out whether you managed to make any new types of particle.

CERN is a big place - a few thousand people work there. Many of them are scientists whose jobs
are at universities in different places in the world, and they come to CERN because they need to
use the huge accelerators at CERN.

What made you think of the WWW?

Well, I found it frustrating that in those days, there was different information on different
computers, but you had to log on to different computers to get at it. Also, sometimes you had to
learn a different program on each computer. So finding out how things worked was really
difficult. Often it was just easier to go and ask people when they were having coffee.

Because people at CERN came from universities all over the world, they brought with them all
types of computers. Not just Unix, Mac and PC: there were all kinds of big mainframe computer
and medium sized computers running all sorts of software.

I actually wrote some programs to take information from one system and convert it so it could be
inserted into another system. More than once. And when you are a programmer, and you solve
one problem and then you solve one that's very similar, you often think, "Isn't there a better way?
Can't we just fix this problem for good?" That became "Can't we convert every information
system so that it looks like part of some imaginary information system which everyone can
read?" And that became the WWW.

What happens when I click on a link?

Actually, it was a grown up who asked this very reasonable question. When you understand this,
then you will understand the difference between the Internet and the Web. And you will realize
that it is all quite simple! :-)

(You can skip the bits in small type)

When you are reading a web page, the computer isn't showing you everything about the link.
Behind the underlined or colored bit of text which you click on is an invisible thing like
http://www.w3.org/. Its called a URL. This is the name of the web page to which the link goes.
(The web page you are reading has this one: http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/kids).
Behind each link, hidden from you, is the URL of the other web page, the one you'd get to if you
followed the link.

When you click on a link, your computer takes this URL. It wants to get a copy of the web page.
There are a few different ways of doing this. The one I'm going to tell you about is just used for
URLs which starthttp: .

(This whole recipe I'm going to tell you, which your computer uses for getting web pages, is called the HyperText
Transfer Protocol. That's what HTTP stands for. There are other protocols. But this is the most common one. )

If the URL starts with http:, then the computer takes the next bit of the URL, between the // and
the /. It might be www.w3.org for example. This is the name of the web server. However, It can't
communicate with the web server until it knows its computer number, because the Internet
actually works with numbers.

(A computer number is actually called its Internet Protocol Address, or IP Address. It is normally written as four
numbers with dots, like 192.168.0.1)

So there will two stages to this - first, finding out the number of the web server, and then asking
the web for a copy of the web page.

Your computer makes up a packet of information. An Internet packet is a message, a bit like a
short email or a long text message. The packet starts off with the number of the computer the
packet is going to, and then the number of the the computer which sent it, and then it has what
the packet is about, and then whatever it is one computer is sending to the other.

Now all over the Internet there are special computers whose job is to keep a list of computer
names and numbers. When your computer is set up, it is set up to know the internet number of
one of these. Your computer sends off the packet to it, saying it wants to know the number of
www.w3.org.

(A computer which can look up computer names -- domain names as they are called -- is called the Domain Name
Service (DNS) server in the network preferences if you really want to know. When a DNS server looks up a
computer name, it either knows it because it has it in a list, or it just asks another DNS server which knows more
names.)

How does the packet get there? Simple. Your computer sends it down the ethernet connection or
phone line from your computer, or it transmits it by radio to a base station which sends it down
some wire. Whatever that wire goes through, eventually it connects to some other computer
(maybe one in the cable company, or phone company).
The Internet is a net -- really shaped like real net like a fishing net -- of computers all connected
together by various cables. Each computer, when it gets a packet, looks at it and sees what
computer number it is being sent to. It then just passes it on to the next computer in the net, in
the general direction toward its destination. Pretty simple? yes, well, it is simple. The packet gets
passed on until it gets to its destination. Typically, a packet might be passed on by more than 10
computers before it arrives.

(This way of getting a packet to its destination is called the Internet Protocol(IP))

In this case, the destination was the name server. The name server looks up the number of the
computer www.w3.org from its name.

Of course the name server knows the number of your computer, because that was in the packet
too. So it sends a reply packet to tell you computer the number it needed.

Ok. Your computer now knows the number of the web server, www.w3.org. So it goes back to the
URL -- remember the thing which started with http:? Lets say the URL behind the link was
http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/FAQ . It has used the www.w3.org bit to find the number
of the web server which has a copy of the page. Now it send off a request to that server asking it
for the web page. It sends the whole URL, and the server sends back a copy.

The only problem is that the web page won't fit in a packet. Packets can only be around 512
bytes - about long enough for a text message of 500 characters. Even the request that your
computer sends off can be longer than will fit in a packet. So what happens is the computer just
breaks the message into parts, and sends each part in a packet. I told you this isn't rocket science.
It just like a television series coming in installments. It also puts in each packet a packet number
so that the other computer can make sure its got all the parts and got them in right order.

(This method of splitting message sup into packets and putting them back together again has a name, which you
don't have to remember. It is Transmission Control Protocol, or TCP. So that's what people mean when they talk
about TCP/IP.)

So your computer gets back a bunch of packets with bits of the web page in them. It puts them in
order and displays them on your screen. There are special codes (called HTML tags) which tell it
when to do things like headings and bold and italics and ... oh, of course... links. Yes, every time
it finds the HTML tag for a link, it displays the text specially (like blue and underlined) and
makes a note of the URL of the linked page. Because at any time, you could click on the link,
and it'll be doing this stuff all over again.

@@@ This really needs lots of nice diagrams @@@

Did you invent the Internet?

No, no, no!

When I was doing the WWW, most of the bits I needed were already done.

Vint Cerf and people he worked with had figured out the Internet Protocol, and also the
Transmission Control Protocol.

Paul Mockapetris and friends had figured out the Domain Name System.

People had already used TCP/IP and DNS to make email, and other cool things. So I could email
other people who maybe would like to help work on making the WWW.

I didn't invent the hypertext link either. The idea of jumping from one document to another had
been thought about lots of people, including Vanevar Bush in 1945, and by Ted Nelson (who
actually invented the word hypertext). Bush did it before computers really existed. Ted thought
of a system but didn't use the internet. Doug Engelbart in the 1960's made a great system just like
WWW except that it just ran on one [big] computer, as the internet hadn't been invented yet. Lots
of hypertext systems had been made which just worked on one computer, and didn't link all the
way across the world.

I just had to take the hypertext idea and connect it to the TCP and DNS ideas and -- ta-da! -- the
World Wide Web.

Just like that?

No, actually the inventing it was easy. The amazing thing which makes it work is that so many
people actually have made web servers, and that they all work the same way, on the Internet.
They all use HTTP.

So the difficult bit was persuading people to join in. And getting them to agree to all use the
same sort of HTTP, and URLs, and HTML. I'm still doing that sort of thing. The World Wide
Web Consortium (W3C) is like a club of people and companies who feel the Web is important,
and keeping it working is important, and making it even better and even more powerful is
important. I am the director of W3C (I started it) but thousands of people are now working on all
kinds of wonderful things.

Why do you keep saying everything is so simple?

Well, because it is basically.

No, honestly...
I want you to know that you too can make new programs which create new fun ways of using
computers and using the Internet.

I want you to realize that, if you can imagine a computer doing something, you can program a
computer to do that.

Unbounded opportunity... limited only by your imagination.

And a couple of laws of physics.

Of course, what happens with computers is that you have a basic simple idea and then you have
to add things on to it for practical reasons. So real-world computer programs can end up with a
lot of stuff in them. If they are good, they are still simple inside.

What did you do when you were a child?

I grew up in south-west London. I wasn't very good at sports. When I was 11 I went to a school
which was between two railway tracks, so I saw lots of trains and started train-spotting. I also
had a model railway in my bedroom. It was a long thin layout with a 4-track station in the
middle, and on each side pairs of tracks going off into tunnels to actually loop back to each other.

I made some electronic gadgets to control the trains. The I ended up getting more interested in
electronics than trains. Later on, when I was in college I made computer out of an old television
set. I bought the television from a repair shop down the road for 5 (about $7).

My mother and father were both working with the very early computers when they met. Later on,
my mother taught maths in school. They taught me that maths is a lot of fun. (In England,
mathematics is "maths", in the USA, "math").

When I went to Oxford University, I studied physics. I thought that science might be more
practical than maths, halfway between math and electronics. In fact it turned out to be very
special subject all of itself, and fascinating for all that.

Can you tell me more about your personal life?

No, I don't want to - sorry. I like to keep work and personal life separate. What is on the web on
this page and my home page is all there is. Please do not email me asking for more information
for school projects, etc. Look -- if you had written a program like WorldWideWeb -- which you
well might --- would you want everyone to know what you had for breakfast? No, you see? Ok.
Thank you for your understanding.

But I am doing a project where we have to get "primary" sources, which means I
have to interview the subject. And I'm doing it on you. So I have to interview you.
I'm sorry, I don't have time to talk to everyone individually. Please use these web pages.

I'm interested in Math -- what exciting stuff is there we don't do at school?

Some kids find solving math problems is fun, and like the power of having new techniques, and
imaging new math concepts. If you are one of those, and you are wondering what bits of math
might be fun to follow up on your own or with friends or friendly adults, here is an attempt to
explain some paths which connect together. Some of it is easy, some hard, but honestly which is
which for you depends on what your mind happens to grasp, and how well it is explained! These
are some of the bits I found interesting. This is NOT an explanation - you will need books and
people for that . It is just a sort of list of places you might want to go.

Vectors are fun. Vectors are quantities with direction, like not just how fast something goes but
which direction it is going in. They can be written as three numbers instead of one. (The
examples in this FAQ will only work is your browser supports MathML, which is rare. If your
browser supports MathML, the following will be vertical, not horizonal.)

( 10 2 4 )

Vectors are fun partly because they are very visual. When you write equations using vectors, you
define shapes in 3D, and how things move, and so on.

When you've done a bit of algebra, then simultaneous equations are good thing to play with. You
don't have to do complicated ones, just look at "linear" equations where you have say 3 equations
and 3 variables, say x, y and z.

x+y=3x-y=13y-z=0

Because you've done vectors, you can visualize each equation as a plane in 3d, and the equations
together define a point with a given x, y and z.

Once you've got the hang of that, look at transformations where a set of linear equations define
a new (x', y', z') in terms of any original point (x, y, z).

x+y=x'x-y=y'3y-z=z'

Two neat things. One is these transformations actually correspond to 3-d transformations such as
squashing space or rotating it, or squishing it sideways. This is quite visual, and thinking of the
3-d transformation is sometimes a quick way of doing things with the equations.

Second neat thing: because you've used stacks of 3 numbers as vectors to represent points, you'll
be happy representing the numbers in the equations in a 3x3 block called a matrix. This way you
can write the transformation as a thing called matrix multiplication. You learn how to multiply
matrices.

( x ' y ' z ' ) = ( 1 1 0 1 -1 0 0 3 -1 ) ( x y z )

or just

x' = M x

where the bold letters stand for vectors and matrices. Suddenly all kinds of things fall into place.
To make a combined transformation, you just multiply two matrices together. You naturally start
wondering about how to undo a transformation, which is finding the inverse transformation,
which is finding the inverse of a matrix. And then you realize that this is just the same problem
as solving the linear equations you had earlier. So any time you can see how to solve the
equations, you can find the inverse matrix. Also, there is a way of working out the inverse of a
3x3 matrix, so you can always solve 3x3 equations (when a solution exists). It is this way
everything fits together which makes math fun and powerful.

Another branch you might be interested in is calculus. This is about things changing and
moving, to its very connected to physics, skiing, driving cars, flying planes, and so on. So it can
also be fun to visualize. When you study calculus, you start off by thinking about how (say) the
speed of a ball changes in a particular millisecond, and how its position changes. There is a lot of
calculus where you know, say, how something's speed changes with time, and you want to figure
out where it gets to. How fast a function changes is another function. Finding it is called
differentiating the first function. The inverse is called integrating. Some people find learning and
puzzling out how to differentiate and integrate all kinds of functions interesting.

But if you have done vectors and matrices then you can connect that to the ideas of calculus, and
you have new powerful mental tools. You can now write equations about the force on something
and its acceleration as vectors.

f=ma

says the force (a vector) on something is equal to the acceleration (how much its velocity is
changing, another vector) times the mass of the thing. You can figure out how things like
spaceships move in 3d space with time.

From there, you can think about values (like density, or pressure, or temperature) which have a
single (non vector) value, but a different value in each place. You can think about how those
values change with place. How does the pressure in a swimming pool change with depth? Why?
Things which have values all over the place are called fields. Think of the pool being filled with
little numbers showing the pressure at that place.
Then you can just put what you know about vectors together with what you know about fields,
and think of values which are different in different places and times, and also have direction.
They are vectors. Imagine a swimming pool full of little arrows, each arrow showing (by size
and direction) how fast and which way the water is moving there. Imagine what happens when
someone dives in. These are called vector fields. It turns out that when you do calculus with
vector fields, you have really neat little results about how stuff swirls around, about how it
squashes (or doesn't), and so on. When you connect how things change with position with how
they change with time, then you can show waves happen. And just as it seems that the equations
are getting complicated again, then suddenly get simple. It turns out that the differentiation in
space can be written as a single "vector operator", called dell and written

This makes all the equations writable in much less space (without even any x's and y's and z's).

One of the significant equations which you get from look the physics of all this is the wave
equation, which tell you about sound waves in a swimming pool and even Maxwell's Equations
which show that light waves follow from the properties of electricity and magnetism.

Another branch of this which connects to matrices is the eigenvector concept. For any
transformation, it turns out there are some vectors which end up being stretched or shrunk but
not changed in direction. These are called eigenvectors. It turns out that for lots of interesting
problems, the eigenvectors are at right angles to each other, just like the x y and z axes. In fact, if
you turn the problem around in your mind, and use the eigenvectors as the axes, then suddenly
the problem becomes really simple. The complicated equations untangle and turn into a set of
unconnected simple equations. Eigenvectors are finding out how complicated things (like a car
suspension) behave. It also turns out that quantum mechanics says that the same equations are
used to find out how atoms behave. Also, it turns out that when search engines like Google look
at a mass of web links around a topic, the eigenvectors of the link matrix correspond to things the
web pages are about, and finding them allows one to find the most relevant page for that topic.
So eigenvectors are a really useful concept.

I guess I've used physics as the hook for most of this math, and that is one reason why it is
interesting personally for me. If that doesn't interest you so much, then maybe the math of prime
numbers will. Check out modulo arithmentic, Euler's theorem, and work your way to the RSA
algorithm for public key cryptography. There are lots of other areas of math of course. And lots
of books on each. And web sites, I'm sure. But there are some of my suggestions if you are
looking for a map of things to look for. The main thing is, to have fun.

So do you think the Web is basically been a good idea or a bad one?

Some people point out that the Web can be used for all the wrong things. For downloading
pictures of horrible, gruesome, violent or obscene things, or ways of making bombs which
terrorists could use.
Other people say how their lives have been saved because they found out about the disease they
had on the Web, and figured out how to cure it.

I think the main thing to remember is that any really powerful thing can be used for good or evil.
Dynamite can be used to build tunnels or to make missiles. Engines can be put in ambulances or
tanks. Nuclear power can be used for bombs or for electrical power.

So what is made of the Web is up to us. You, me, and everyone else.

Here is my hope.

The Web is a tool for communicating.

With the Web, you can find out what other people mean. You can find out where they are coming
from.

The Web can help people understand each other.

Think about most of the bad things that have happened between people in your life. Maybe most
of them come down to one person not understanding another. Even wars.

Let's use the web to create neat new exciting things.

Let's use the Web to help people understand each other.

Web History 101: A Brief History of the World Wide Web

The Birth of the Web: How Did The World Wide Web Get Started?

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Safety & Privacy

Running a Website

by Wendy Boswell
Updated June 17, 2016

Going online....the Web....getting on the Internet....these are all terms that we're quite familiar
with. Entire generations now have grown up with the Web as a ubiquitous presence in our lives,
from using it to find information on any subject you can possibly think of, to getting directions
via GPS delivered via geolocation to our smart phones, finding people we've lost touch with,
even shopping online and getting anything we want delivered to our front door.

It's amazing to look back just a few short decades to see how far we've come, but as much we're
enjoying the Web as we know it now, it's equally important to keep in mind the technology and
pioneers that got us to where we are today. In this article, we'll take a brief look at this
fascinating journey.

The Web, officially launched as an offshoot of the Internet in 1989, has not been around that
long. However, it has become a huge part of many peoples lives; enabling them to
communicate, work, and play in a global context. The Web is all about relationships, and has
made these relationships possible between individuals, groups, and communities where they
wouldnt have been otherwise. This Web is a community without borders, limits, or even rules;
and has become a true world of its own.
One of the world's most successful experiments

The Web is a giant experiment, a global theory, that has amazingly enough worked pretty well.

Its history illustrates the ways that technological advancement and innovation can move along
unintended paths. Originally, the Web and the Internet were created to be part of a military
strategy, and not meant for private use. However, as in many experiments, theories, and plans,
this didnt actually happen.

Communication

More than any technical definition, the Web is a way that people communicate. The Internet,
which is what the Web is laid down upon, started in the 1950s as an experiment by the
Department of Defense. They wanted to come up with something that would enable secure
communications between various military units. However, once this technology was out, there
was no stopping it. Universities such as Harvard and Berkeley caught wind of this revolutionary
technology and made important modifications to it, such as addressing the individual computers
from which communications originated (otherwise known as IP addressing).

Instant access to people around the world

More than anything else, the Internet made people realize that communicating just by snail mail
was less effective (not to mention much slower) than free email on the Web. The possibilities of
world-wide communication were mind-boggling to people when the Web was just getting
started. Nowadays, we think nothing of emailing our aunts in Germany (and getting an answer
back within minutes), or seeing the latest streaming music video. The Internet and the Web have
revolutionized the way we communicate; not only with individuals, but with the world as well.

Are there rules on the Web?

All the systems on the Web work together, some better than others, but while there are many
different systems on the Web, none of them are governed by any special rules. This system, as
large and wonderful as it might be, has no specific oversight; which gives some users an unfair
advantage. Access to it is not necessarily distributed democratically throughout the world at
large.

The Web has united people all over the world, but what happens when some folks have access to
this technology and others dont? Right now, all over the world, approximately 605 million
people have access to the Web.. Even though this technology has already united so many people
and has the potential to unite so many more, its not a catch-all utopian solution to making the
world a better place. Social changes and improvements, such as making technology more
accessible to people, have to happen before the Web can make any kind of progress.
Does everyone have access to the Web?

Someone without a computer cant google it; someone without access to the Web cant
download the latest ring tones for their PDA; but most of all, someone without Web access is not
able to compete in the global marketplace of ideas or commerce. The Web is a revolutionary
technology, but not everyone can access it. As the Web continues to grow, more and more people
are gaining access to this information.Its up to each one of us to learn how to harness this power
and use it effectively in our own lives, and enable those who do not have access to it in order for
them to be able to compete on a more level playing field.

How Did The Web Get Started? An Early History

In the late 1980s, a CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research) scientist named Tim
Berners-Lee came up with the idea of hypertext, information that was linked to another set of
information.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee's idea was more of convenience than anything else; he just wanted the
researchers at CERN to be able to communicate more easily via a single informational network,
instead of many smaller networks that were not linked with one another in any sort of universal
way. The idea was completely born out of necessity.

Heres the original announcement of the technology that changed the world from Tim Berners-
Lee to the alt.hypertext newsgroup he chose to debut it in. At the time, no one had any idea how
much this seemingly small idea would go on to change the world we live in:

"The WorldWideWeb (WWW) project aims to allow links to be made to any information
anywhere. [...] The WWW project was started to allow high energy physicists to share data,
news, and documentation. We are very interested in spreading the web to other areas, and having
gateway servers, Google Groups, for other data. Collaborators welcome!" - source

Hyperlinks

One of Tim Berners-Lee's idea include hypertext technology. This hypertext technology included
hyperlinks, which enabled users to peruse information from any linked network merely by
clicking on a link. These links make up the superstructure of the Web; without them, the Web
simply would not exist.

How did the Web grow so fast?

One of the biggest reasons that the Web grew as fast as it did was the freely distributed
technology behind it. Tim Berners-Lee managed to persuade CERN to provide the web
technology and program code absolutely for free so that anyone could use it, improve it, tweak it,
innovate it you name it.
Obviously, this concept took off in a big way. From CERNs hallowed research halls, the idea of
hyper-linked information went first to other institutions in Europe, then to Stanford University,
then Web servers began popping up all over the place. According to the BBCs write up of Web
history at Fifteen Years of the Web, the growth of the Web in 1993 annual growth was at an
utterly staggering 341,634% as compared to the previous year.

Are the Web and the Internet the same thing?

The Internet and the World Wide Web (WWW) are terms that to most people mean about the
same thing. While they are related, their definitions are different.

What is the Internet?

The Internet is at its most basic definition an electronic communications network. It is the
structure on which the World Wide Web is based.

What is the World Wide Web?

The World Wide Web is a part of the Internet "designed to allow easier navigation through the
use of graphical user interfaces and hypertext links between different addresses"
(source:Websters).

The World Wide Web was created in 1989 by Tim Berners-Lee, and continues to change and
expand rapidly. The Web is the user part of the Internet. People use the Web to communicate and
access information for business and recreational purposes.

The Internet and the Web work together, but they are not the same thing. The Internet provides
the underlying structure, and the Web utilizes that structure to offer content, documents,
multimedia, etc.

Did Al Gore really create the Internet?

One of the most persistent urban myths in the last ten years has been that of former Vice
President Al Gore being part of the invention of the Internet as we know it today. The reality is
not necessarily as cut and dried as this; it's much less exciting.

Here are his exact words: During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative
in creating the Internet. Taken out of context, it certainly does appear that hes taking credit for
inventing something that he really didnt; however, its just awkward phrasing that coupled with
the rest of his statement (mostly focused on economic growth) actually does make sense. If you
want to read what was said (along with background information) in its' entirety, you'll want to
check out this resource: Al Gore "invented the Internet" - resources.
Its interesting to speculate on how things would be different had Berners-Lee and CERN
decided NOT to be so magnanimous! The idea of information all kinds of information being
instantly accessible from anywhere on Earth was an idea too captivating not to experience the
intensely viral growth that the Web has experienced since its inception; and there seems to be no
stopping it anytime soon.

Early Web history: Timeline

The World Wide Web was officially introduced to the world on August 6, 1991 by Sir Tim
Berners-Lee. Here are some Web history highlights as originally referenced from the BBC.

1957:The United States Department of Defense formed a small agency

called ARPA (Advanced Research Projects Agency) to develop military science
and technology.

1961-1965:The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) started to

research sharing information in small, phone-linked networks. ARPA is one of
their main sponsors.

1966: The first ARPANET plan is unveiled by Larry Roberts of MIT. Packet
switching technology is getting off the ground, and small university networks
are beginning to be developed.

1969:The Department of Defense commissions the fledgling ARPAnet for

network research. The first official network nodes were UCLA, Standford
Research Institute,UCSB, and the University of Utah. The first node to node
message was sent from UCLA to SRI.

1971: more nodes join the network, bringing the total to 15. These new
nodes include Harvard and NASA.

1973: ARPAnet goes global when the the University College of London and
Norway's Royal Radar Establishment join up.

1974: Network intercommunication is becoming more sophisticated; data is

now transmitted more quickly and efficiently with the design of TCP
(Transmission Control Program).

1976: Unix is developed at AT and T; Queen Elizabeth sends out her first
email message.

1979: USENET, the mother of all networked discussion groups, is developed.

1982: Internet technology protocols are developed, commonly known as

TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol and Internet Protocol). This leads to one
of the first definitions of an "internet" being a connected set of networks.
 1984: Number of hosts is now up to 1000, with more being added every day.

1985: The first registered domain is Symbolics.com.

1987: Number of hosts breaks the 10,000 mark.

1988: First large-scale Internet worm affects thousands of Internet hosts.

1991: Tim Berners-Lee develops the World Wide Web. Tim Berners-
Lee formally introduced his project to the world on the alt.hypertext
newsgroup. In the post he said the project "aims to allow links to be made to
any information anywhere". It did this by using hypertext a method for linking
between different documents. Although invented many years earlier Mr
Berners-Lee's invention married hypertext with the internet. He also made
available all of the files necessary for people to replicate his invention.

1993: The World Wide Web's annual growth is now at a staggering

341,634%. Tim Berners-Lee managed to persuade CERN to provide the web
technology and program code for free so that anyone could use and improve
it. The decision is credited as one of the key reasons the web grew so
quickly. The HTML markup language used to create webpages is released.

1994: ARPAnet celebrates 25th anniversary. Yahoo was started by Stanford

University students David Filo and Jerry Yang. It was originally called "Jerry's
Guide to the World Wide Web" a site featuring a hierarchical directory of other
sites. It was renamed Yahoo soon after. The name stands for Yet Another
Hierarchical Officious Oracle. Some net ranking firms say that Yahoo is the
most visited site on the web today. President Bill Clinton
puts whitehouse.gov on the web.

1995-1997: RealAudio introduces Internet streaming technology, dial-up

systems emerge (America Online, Compuserve), the Internet backbone
continues to be strengthened with the addition of MCI, Microsoft and
Netscape fight for WWW browser supremacy, and there are now more than
70,000 mailing lists. The online book store was originally founded as
Cadabra.com by Jeff Bezos in 1994. It was one of the first major companies to
sell goods on the web. Although it started as an online bookstore it now sells
music,electronics, furniture, and even food. Microsoft's Internet Explorer is
released as part of Windows 95.

1998: Google opens its first office in a garage in California. MySpace was
originally an online storage and file sharing firm but was shut down in 2001.
The social networking site in its present form launched in July 2003. It was set
up 2003 by Tom Anderson, Chris DeWolfe, and a small team of programmers.
MySpace now has close to 100 million users. The site lets users build a
personalized home page, blogs, photos, music, and a messaging system. In
2005, media tycoon Rupert Murdoch paid 580m for the site. MySpace paved
the way for other social media sites, such as Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest.
 1998-2000: The dotcom bubble had been growing since 1997. The
excitement surrounding the web caused share prices to soar. In January 2000
it reached its peak when the Dow Jones Industrial Average closed at a record
level never reached before or since. On March 10 the NASDAQ Composite
Index also reached an all-time high. Soon after, the markets began to crash
and with it went many of the start up companies bankrolled during the
dotcom boom. Nearly 20 million websites online at this point.

2000-2014: The "Wardrobe Malfunction" Becomes the Most Searched For Image in Web
History: January 5, 2004. During a halftime show with Justin Timberlake at the
Superbowl pop star Janet Jackson had a "wardrobe malfunction". Following the event
search engines reported a surge in searches for terms such as Janet Jackson and Super
Bowl as people looked for images of the event. There are now 92615362 websites online.

2016-future: According to Internet statistics, after reaching 1 billion

websites in September of 2014, a milestone confirmed by NetCraft in its
October 2014 Web Server Survey and that Internet Live Stats was the first
to announce (see the tweet from the inventor of the World Wide Web, Tim
Berners-Lee) the number of websites in the world has subsequently declined,
reverting back to a level below 1 billion. This is due to the monthly
fluctuations in the count of inactive websites. We do expect, however, to
exceed 1 billion websites again sometime in 2016/2017, and to stabilize the
count above this historic milestone in 2017/2018
(credit: InternetLiveStats.com).

The Web is part of our everyday lives

Could you imagine your life without using the Web - no email, no access to breaking news, no
up to the minute weather reports, no way to shop online, etc.? Probably you can't. We have
grown to be dependent on this technology - it has transformed the way that we conduct out lives.
Try to go one day without using the Web in some fashion-you'll probably be surprised at how
much you depend on it.

Always evolving and growing

The Web cant actually be tracked down, you cant point at it and say there it is! The Web is a
continual, ongoing process. It never has stopped replicating itself or progressing since the day it
began, and it probably will keep evolving as long as people are around to keep developing it. Its
made up of personal relationships, business partnerships, and global associations. If the Web
didnt have these interpersonal relationships, it wouldnt exist.

The Growth of the Web

The growth of the Web has been explosive, to say the very least. There are more people online
than at any other point in history, and more people use the Web to shop than at any other time in
history. This growth shows no sign of slowing down as more people are able to access the Web's
seemingly limitless resources.
Who is Tim Berners-Lee?

Tim Berners-Lee (born 1955) is best known for being the person attributed with the creation of
the World Wide Web. He originally came up with the idea of sharing and organizing information
from any computer system in any geographical location by using a system of hyperlinks (simple
textual connections that "linked" one piece of content to the next) and Hypertext Transfer
Protocol (HTTP), a way that computers could receive and retrieve Web pages.

Berners-Lee also created HTML (HyperText Markup Language), the standard programming
language behind every Web page, as well as a URL (Uniform Resource Locator) system that
gave every Web page its unique designation.

How did Tim Berners-Lee come up with the idea of the World Wide Web?

While at CERN, Tim Berners-Lee grew increasingly frustrated with how information was being
shared and organized. Every computer at CERN stored different information which required
unique log-ins, and not every computer could be easily accessed. This situation sparked Berners-
Lee to come up with a simple proposal for information management, which was the World Wide
Web.

Did Tim Berners-Lee invent the Internet?

No, Tim Berners-Lee did not invent the Internet. The Internet was created in the late 1960's as a
collaborative effort between several universities and the U.S. Department of Defense
(ARPANET). Tim Berners-Lee used the already existing Internet as the foundation for how the
World Wide Web would function.

For more on the early days of the Internet, read The History of the Internet.

What is the difference between the Internet and the World Wide Web?

The Internet is a vast network, comprised of many different computer networks and cables and
wireless devices, all interconnected. The Web, on the other hand, is information (content, text,
images, movies, sound, etc.) that can be found using connections (hyperlinks) that connect to
other hyperlinks on the Web.

We use the Internet to connect to other computers and networks; we use the Web to locate
information. The World Wide Web could not exist without the Internet as its foundation.

How did the phrase "World Wide Web" come into being?

According to the official Tim Berners-Lee FAQ, the phrase "World Wide Web" was chosen for
its alliterative quality and because it best described the Web's global, decentralized format (i.e., a
web). Since those early days the phrase has shortened in common usage to just being referred to
as the Web.

What was the first Web page ever created?

A copy of the first Web page ever created by Tim Berners-Lee can be found at The World Wide
Web Project. It's a fun way to really see how far the Web has come in just a few short years. In
fact, Tim Berners-Lee used his office NeXT computer to act as the world's first web server.

What is Tim Berners-Lee up to now?

Sir Tim Berners-Lee is the Founder and Director of the World Wide Web Consortium, an
organization aimed at developing sustainable Web standards. He also works as the director of the
World Wide Web Foundation, a co-director of the Web Science Trust, and is a professor at the
University of Southampton's Computer Science Department.

A more detailed look at all of Tim Berners-Lee's involvements and awards can be found at his
official biography page.

A Web Pioneer: Tim Berners-Lee

Sir Tim Berners-Lee created the World Wide Web in 1989. Sir Tim Berners-Lee (he was
knighted by Queen Elizabeth in 2004 for his pioneering work) originated the idea of sharing
information freely via hyperlinks, created HTML (HyperText Markup Language), and came up
with the idea of each Web page having a unique address, or URL (Uniform Resource Locator).
How Big Is The Web? How Many Websites Are There?

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Web & Search

Search Engines

Best of the Web

Safety & Privacy

Running a Website

by Wendy Boswell
Updated October 19, 2016

How big, really, is the Web? The growth of the Web has been exponential over the last decade
with no sign of stopping. Hundreds of thousands of websites have emerged on every subject
imaginable, with literally millions of web pages online.

Internet Live Stats, a site that measures Internet statistic estimates that every second, there are at
least 7000 Tweets sent, 1140 Tumblr posts posted online, 733 photos posted on Instagram, 2207
Skype calls, 55,364 Google searches, 127, 354 YouTube videos viewed, and over 2 million
emails sent.

Remember - that's the average in just one second on the Web. Extrapolate that out to an hour, a
day, a week, a month, or a year, and the number quickly reach towards an unbelievable state.

How many websites are there online?

It's estimated that there are well over one billion sites on the Web today, an amazing number. As
of July 2016, the Indexed Web contains at least 4.75 billion pages, according to
WorldWideWebSize.com, a site that developed a statistical method for tracking the number of
pages indexed by major search engines.
That's just the activity on the surface Web - the Web that is searchable via a simple search engine
query. These numbers, amazing though they are, give us a small glimpse into how mammoth the
Web really is. The Invisible Web is estimated to be many thousands of times larger than the Web
content we can find with general search engine queries. For example, the Invisible Web contains
approximately 550 billion individual documents compared to the one billion of the surface Web.

So how big, really, is the Web?

Between the staggering amount of data that is added on a minute by minute basis to the surface
Web and the astonishing amount of content that exists in the Invisible Web, it's difficult to get a
completely accurate picture of how big the Web really is - especially since it all keeps growing
exponentially.

The best way to go about figuring this out is to look at several different measurements:

How much content is online? One way to estimate the capacity of the
Internet is to measure the traffic moving through it. According to Cisco's
Visual Networking Index initiative, the Internet is now in the "zettabyte era."
A zettabyte equals 1 sextillion bytes, or 1,000 exabytes. By the end of 2016,
global Internet traffic will reach 1.1 zettabytes per year, according to Cisco,
and by 2019, global traffic is expected to hit 2 zettabytes per year. One
zettabyte is the equivalent of 36,000 years of high-definition video, which, in
turn, is the equivalent of streaming Netflix's entire catalog 3,177 times; in
just three minutes, the amount of data travelling over the Internet in just
three minutes is the digital equivalent of every motion picture ever made in
the last 120 years.

How many Web pages are there? Assuming that each website has
approximately 6-8 pages (on average), the Washington Post estimated that
there are 305,500,000,000 pages online. If you wanted to print those out,
you'd need enough paper for roughly 305 billion pages. How long would it
take to download the entire Web? If you tried to download the Web from
your computer, it would take approximately 11 trillion years.

Could you put the entire Web in one place? Maybe. If you packed 450 2-
terabyte storage drives into a single 8 x 10 room, youd need 1,000 drive-
packed rooms to equal the estimated Exabyte of data on the Web.

How many pages does Google have in its index? Search engines catalog
billions of pages, but because of the sheer volume of information out there -
not to mention the Invisible Web that includes pages that aren't able to be
indexed - they are not able to search and/or index the entire Web. According
to VentureBeat, Google says that the web now has 30 trillion unique
individual pages...and that it stores information about those 30 trillion pages
in the Google Index, which is now at 100 million gigabytes. Thats about a
thousand terabytes, and youd need over three million 32GB USB thumb
drives to store all that data.
 How fast is the Web growing? Since 2012, the Web nearly doubles in size
every single year.

How many people use the Web? It's estimated that there are over 3 billion
people getting online worldwide.

How big is the Web? In a word, it's huge

The numbers quoted in this article are so mind-boggling that it's hard to wrap our heads around
them. The Web is big and is only going to get bigger; becoming more and more a part of our
daily lives, both personal and professional. As the Web evolves, it's smart for all of us to learn
how to navigate it effectively. Here are a few resources that can help you get started:

How Did The Web Get Started? Learn more about how the Web first got
started and early history of the World Wide Web.

What is a Web Browser? You need a Web browser in order to use the Web.
Find out what these are and how you can use them in your travels online.

How Does A Search Engine Work? Find out how these amazingly useful tools
work, and how you can put them to work for you.

What is Google? Google is the world's most popular search engine. Find out
more about it, and how you can use it effectively.

The term World Wide Web (WWW) refers to the collection of public Web sites connected to
the Internet worldwide, together with the client devices such as computers and cell phones that
access its content. For many years it has become known simply as "the Web."

Origination and Early Development of the World Wide Web

Researcher Tim Berners-Lee led the development of the World Wide Web in the late 1980s and
early 1990s.

He helped build prototypes of the original core Web technologies and coined the term "WWW."
Web sites and Web browsing exploded in popularity during the mid-1990s and continue to be a
key usage of the Internet today

About Web Technologies

The WWW is just one of many applications of the Internet and computer networks.It is based on
these three core technologies:
 HTML - Hypertext Markup Language. HTML originally supported only text
documents, but with enhancements during the 1990s grew capable of
handling frames,style sheets and plugins for general purpose Web site
content publishing.

HTTP - Hypertext Transfer Protocol. HTTP finally made it to version 2.0 after
20 years, indicative of how well the protocol accommodated the Web's
growth.

Web servers and Web browsers. The original Netscape has given way to many
other browser applications, but the same concepts of client-server
communication still apply.

Although some people use the two terms interchangeably, the Web is built on top of the Internet
and is not the Internet itself. Examples of popular applications of the Internet separate from the
Web include

email

Peer to Peer (P2P) networks like BitTorrent

TOR and other Dark Web (darknet) systems

The World Wide Web Today

All major Web sites have adjusted their content design and development approach to
accommodate the rapidly increasing fraction of the population accessing the Web from small-
screen phones instead of large screen desktop and laptop computers.

Privacy and anonymity on the Internet are an increasingly important issue on the Web as
significant amounts of personal information including a person's search history and browsing
patterns are routinely captured (often for targeted advertising purposes) along with some
geolocation information. Anonymous Web proxy services attempt to provide online users an
extra level of privacy by re-routing their browsing through third-party Web servers.

Web sites continue to be accessed by their domain names and extensions. While "dot-com"
domains remain the most popular, numerous others can now be registered including ".info" and
".biz" domains.

Competition among Web browsers continues to be strong as IE and Firefox continue to enjoy
large followings, Google has established its Chrome browser as a market contender, and Apple
continues to advance the Safari browser.
HTML5 re-established HTML as a modern Web technology after having stagnated for many
years. Similarly, the performance enhancements of HTTP version 2 have ensured the protocol
will remain viable for the foreseeable future.