| Chapter 1: | The World Wide Web: A General Introduction |
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Several factors discouraged wider use of the Internet (Abbate, 1999). First, the interface was drab and text-only, which was in sharp contrast to the attractive graphical interfaces used on personal computers. Second, it was very difficult to locate and retrieve information on the Internet. Users had to know the exact name of the desired file plus its host computer to retrieve it. Third, there was no way to link online information found in different documents, and no program that could handle formats as diverse as mail, file transfer, gopher, and the Wide-Area Information Server (WAIS). The World Wide Web was to solve all these problems and change the Internet in fundamental ways.
To Tim Berners-Lee and his colleagues at the European Laboratory for Particle Physics (CERN),2 the aim was to create a hypertext system that could store random associations between disparate things. Part of the goal behind the design was to create a common information space through which people could communicate by sharing information. Another part was to create a system that would be a realistic mirror of the ways in which people work, play, and socialize (Berners-Lee, 1999). The outcome of the work, mostly attributable to Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau, was the World Wide Web.
The first version of the Web program began operating on NeXT machines within CERN in December 1990 and was an instant hit among its users. In summer 1991, the software was released to the public by CERN for free download (Abbate, 1999). By the end of that year, the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center in California set up the first Web server in the United States, which made available the contents of an existing large database of abstracts of physics papers.