Week One | Part Two

Who Really Built the World Wide Web?

The Internet as we know it came into being in 1991 when Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Caillau collaborated at CERN, a high energy physics research center near Geneva, Switzerland. What they were looking for --- and eventually developed --- was a simple way to share textual and graphical data via a computer network. Their invention was ever after known as the World Wide Web.

If we look at what the Web is and what makes it work, we realize there are just four basic parts:

1. A bunch of computers linked together to make a network;
2. A program so each computer can share text and graphic files with the other computers;
3. A way for people to view those files; and,
4. A common language so all the computers present those files in the same way.

Computer networks have been around since the 1950s. We can thank the Cold War for the practice of linking computers together to create the Internet.

The file sharing program that creates the free flow of data between them is called a transfer protocol. There are several types. FTP, or File Transfer Protocol, is the one Web site developers use to PUT (or place) their Web pages onto a Web site server. More on that a little later.

Viewing the data is accomplished with a program called a browser. Firefox, Internet Explorer and Opera are all browser programs. The granddaddy of them all --- and the one that gave birth to the term "surfing the Web" --- was called Mosaic.

Envisioning a New Techology

The concept of the Web began in the 1940s with Dr. Vannevar Bush, the Director of the United States Office of Scientific Research and Development during World War Two.

In an article he published called As We May Think, Dr. Bush described a computer-aided language that would allow people to link their documents to other documents over a far flung network of computers. He called this program 'memex', and the concept of hypertexting was born.

The language Dr. Bush envisioned, and which computer scientists subsequently developed, was not a programming language. A programming language (such as C or Basic) tells a computer to do a particular task through a series of specially coded instructions. Dr. Bush was thinking of a mark-up language which would tell a computer how to make the information in a file look.

Fifty years later, when Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Caillau were dreaming up the Web, they imagined a similar markup language that would make linking documents an easy process.

Actually, they figured they would need two programs --- one to mark up the documents, and another to transfer them over the network.

This is why we have hypertext transfer protocol and hypertext markup language as the basis for the World Wide Web.

But where did the idea of the World Wide Web come from?

Please go to Week One Part 3 »