Why was the World Wide Web made? Who made it? How did it grow as big as it is? These are questions that lead one to study this grand invention?
The Web is very young; Tim Berners Lee thought of the brilliant ‑the thought of the web‑ Idea in the late 1980s. Tim spoke of his idea to anyone who would listen, and asked for his idea to be adopted, and made a reality. In 1990 he kept proposing his idea to people in the internet field ‑starting with Ian Ritchie, who came up with the idea of hypertext‑ but people didn't see the value, and potential in Tims idea.
Tim realized if he was going to make his idea work, he had to make a browser, and some servers to show the potential. He made a good demonstration of the Web at CERN, in Switzerland. This was the perfect place, because CERN was full of scientists, from around the world, who had jobs ‑at universities‑ in their home countries. They needed to communicate more easily.
I like the way “A Breif(ish) History On The Web Universe” writes of Tims situation: "In 1989, despite being actually necessary at this point for CERN to function, a memo went out reminding that it [the web] was 'unsupported'. A lot of the best things in history turn out to effectively have been people of good will working together outside the system to get things done that needed getting done."
Tim's boss, Mike Sendall, knew of a way to enable Tims idea to be caried out by Tim. Mike new of Steve Job's NeXT computer, so in 1990 on September Tim would be able to start. In 1990 on December a prototype was released.
Tim had to make the web alone, and he had to do it without extra money, or resources. The only reason CERN was much benefit to Tim was because CERN was a science lab, Tim was able to find an SGMLGuid (also called GUID). SGMLGuid is the guide for SGML, which was based on GML ‑which stood for Goldfarb, Mosher and Lorie (the names of the creators) but was mistaken to stand for Generalized Markup Language. I know it was a mistake because no one denies those to be the creators, and Goldfarb declared “Later in 1971, when product development was imminent, I gave GML its present name so that our initials would always prove where it had originated. The S on SGML stands for Standard the rest are the same as GML.
When I looked at the code of SGML, and GML, I saw many similarities to Tims code. I will not compare, and contrast them here, but I will say it is clear that Tim made use of these computer languages.
The first web browser, the one from 1990, was called the WorldWideWeb (no spaces), but the name changed to Nexus, because WorldWideWeb, and World Wide Web can get very confusing. Nexus had a graphical user interface (GUI), which means when a user interacts with something on the screen the properties can change size, color, shape, et cetera. The Nexus browser could not open web sites containing embedded graphics‑though at the time this was not a problem.
Nexus was not a very easily acquired browser, because it only worked on NeXTStep operating systems. A new web browser was needed, so a new web browser was made. In 1991 the second browser was made. That browser was called the Line Mode browser. The Line Mode browser did not have as many feathers as the Nexus browser; the only improvement from Line Mode was that it could be used on more ‑not any‑ computers. The line mode browser looked as boring as this paper ‑almost identical.
The line mode browser was just enough to get the web started though. People started using the web. One web site of that early stage was WWW Talk Archives 1991.
Another more significant event happened in 1991. Tim started announcing his project on the internet (internet does not mean web, the web is simply attached to the internet) in August to alt.hypertext. (alt.hypertext is a news group for "hypertext enthusiasts"). Berners told this news group how to attain his software from CERN. This enabled the first server outside of Europe to be installed at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) in California on December twelfth.
After people started joining the web, people started makeing new web browsers. These browsers were useful, but there wern't very many web sites. We only know of twenty-two web sites from that time, which was 1992. During that time there were six web browsers ‑ Made in 1990: WorldWideWeb; made in 1991: Line Mode Browser; made in 1992: Erwise, MacWWW (Also called Samba), MidasWWW, and ViolaWWW (ViolaWWW is not Viola; Viola is a programing language, ViolaWWW is a web browser).
Those were the browsers that started the Browser Wars. The Browser Wars were when browsers would compete with other browsers for the position of best browser. Every time someone reached the top someone else climbed higher.
In January 1992 the "prototype" of the web was replaced by a better version; a more reliable version. Then scientists were told how to access phone numbers, email addresses, news groups, as well as computing and software documentation, through the web, from the CERN Newsletter. Those scientists also learned how to find information that was useful to them.
Though the web at that time was used for academic prepossesses, it had nonacademic people growing interest. As the web grew people started developing new browsers, and during 1992 early graphical browsers (browsers that can include images with text in the same window) were being developed.
In January 1993 the Mosaic browser (from National Center for Supercomputing Applications ‑NCSA) introduced pre-releases for the Unix X Window System. It was officialy released on April 21 that same year. In addition to what Nexus offered Mosaic allowed a user to access embedded graphics directly from web pages, and Mosaic could be used on the most popular computer systems. It functioned with fifty-six kilo modurates (also called modums, a modurate is a device that reads digital code, then converts it into radio waves, and the other way around).
Nine days after the official Mosaic release, CERN put the Worldwide Wed on the public domain. Because CERN was trying to grow the web, when they added it to the public domain, they permitted people to add to it. The web grew noticeably bigger that year.
Robert Cailiau organized the first web conference in May 1994. Three hundred eighty users, and developers attended the Conference.
In October 1994 Tim founded the World Wide Web Consortium, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology laboratory for computer science. He stayed there and remains Director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).
By the end of 1994, the web had over 10,000 servers, and 10 million users. 2,000 of those users were commercial. "Traffic was equivalent to shipping the collected works of Shakespeare every second" (quote from https://web30.web.cern.ch/web-history.html).
Based on the foundations of the Mosaic browser Netscape was the first widely used browser. Netscape browsers started to sell in 1994, at the time it was called Mozilla. Mozilla started a new, better version in 1998, which allowed open-source code. Open-source code means the code can be changed, or edited by programmers as they see fit, but it will not automatically change it for every programmer, rather it is uploaded to the web, then the web uses a code to tell which web browsers use that code.
The World Wide Web was made to make communication easier. It was made by Tim Berners Lee. It grew through programmers making web pages, and web browsers. These are answers to questions that lead us to study that grand invention.