Written by Ian Peter
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Before the World Wide Web the Internet really only provided screens full of text
(and usually only in one font and font size). So although it was pretty good for
exchanging information, and indeed for accessing information such as the
Catalogue of the US Library of Congress, it was visually very boring.
In an attempt to make this more aesthetic, companies like Compuserve and AOL
began developing what used to be called GUIs (or graphical user interfaces).
GUIs added a bit of colour and a bit of layout, but were still pretty boring.
Indeed IBM personal computers were only beginning to adopt Windows interfaces -
before that with MSDOS interfaces they were pretty primitive. So the Internet
might have been useful, but it wasn't good looking.
Probably the World Wide Web saved the net. Not only did it change its
appearance, it made it possible for pictures and sound to be displayed and
exchanged.
The web had some important predecessors, perhaps the most significant of these
being Ted Nelson's Xanadu project, which worked on the concept of Hypertext -
where you could click on a word and it would take you somewhere else. Ted Nelson
envisaged with Xanadu a huge library of all the worlds' information. In order to
click on hyperlinks, as they were called, Douglas Engelbart invented the mouse,
which was to later become a very important part of personal computers. So the
idea of clicking on a word or a picture to take you somewhere else was a basic
foundation of the web.
Another important building block was the URL or Uniform Resource Locator. This
allowed you a further option to find your way around by naming a site. Every
site on the worldwide web has a unique URL (such as www.nethistory.info).
The other feature was Hypertext Markup Language (html), the language that
allowed pages to display different fonts and sizes, pictures, colours etc.
Before HTML, there was no such standard, and the "GUIs we talked about before
only belonged to different computers or different computer software. They could
not be networked.
It was Tim Berners Lee who brought this all together and created the World Wide
Web. The first trials of the World Wide Web were at the CERN laboratories (one
of Europe's largest research laboratories) in Switzerland in December 1990. By
1991 browser and web server software was available, and by 1992 a few
preliminary sites existed in places like University of Illinois, where Mark
Andreesen became involved. By the end of 1992, there were about 26 sites.
The first browser which became popularly available to take advantage of this was
Mosaic, in 1993. Mosaic was as slow as a wet week, and really didn't handle
downloading pictures well at all - so the early world wide web experience with
Mosaic, and with domestic modems that operated at one sixths of current modem
speeds at best, were pretty lousy and really didn't give much indication of the
potential of this medium.
On April 30, 1993 CERN's directors made a statement that was a true milestone in
Internet history. On this day, they declared that WWW technology would be freely
usable by anyone, with no fees being payable to CERN. This decision - much in
line with the decisions of the earlier Internet pioneers to make their products
freely available - was a visionary and important one.
The browser really did begin to change everything. By the end of 1994 there were
a million browser copies in use - rapid growth indeed!!
In the same year Marc Andreesen founded Netscape Corporation, and the World Wide
Web Consortium, which administers development of Word Wide Web standards, was
formed by Tim Berners Lee.
Then we really started to see growth. Every year from 1994 to 2000, the Internet
saw massive growth, the like of which had not been seen with any preceding
technology. The Internet era had begun.
The first search engines began to appear in the mid 1990s, and it didn't take
long for Google to come on the scene, and establish a dominant market position.
In the early days, the web was mainly used for displaying information. On line
shopping, and on line purchase of goods, came a little bit later. The first
large commercial site was Amazon, a company which in its initial days
concentrated solely on book markets. The Amazon concept was developed in 1994, a
year in which some people claim the world wide web grew by an astonishing 2300
percent! Amazon saw that on line shopping was the way of the future, and chose
the book market as a field where much could be achieved.
By 1998 there were 750,000 commercial sites on the world wide web, and we were
beginning to see how the Internet would bring about significant changes to
existing industries. In travel for instance, we were able to compare different
airlines and hotels and get the cheapest fares and accommodation - something
pretty difficult for individuals to do before the world wide web. Hotels began
offering last minute rates through specially constructed websites, thus
furthering the power of the web as a sales medium.
And things went even further - in some fields of travel, individuals would
outline where they wanted to travel to and from, and travel companies would then
bid for the business. All these developments rapidly changed the way traditional
markets worked. In some industries, the world would never be the same again.
Permission to re-use this material for non-commercial purposes is granted provided that
www.nethistory.info is appropriately
credited as the source.
Please feel free to link to this page!
Buy Ian Peter's History of the Internet Audio CD
here