29 years since the first Web page - December 12, 1991, Stanford Linear Accelerator Center

On December 12, 1991, a Web server and the first Web pages connecting to the center's library were installed at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC). The first Web server was made almost a year ago, the European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva, Switzerland, and originally called the nxoc01.cern.ch and then info.cern.ch . The first web page even contained the presentation of the project and was accessible at:

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

How did things actually go?

We know that in '90 - '91, when the Internet was already in full development, after the project and all its modules had been developed in the United States, at Stanford Research Institute, at UCLA, UCSB, WU, etc., by realizing what what we now call the Web, it's the turn of Europeans. Specifically, at the European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN) Geneva, through the project of Tim Berners-Lee and the contribution of several colleagues and students, was created the first navigator and link editor (with a first version of the HTML language) and the first program Web server. At that time, communication via the Internet, through the services of that time, that is e-mail, ftp and telnet, was going well and was quite seriously used by the academic community. In 1991, traffic through the NSF node (core of the Internet) exceeded 1 billion bytes / hour, and the number of connected computers exceeded half a million. 1991 is also the year in which the National Science Foundation renounces the ban on the use of the Internet for commercial purposes, creating the premises for the economic 'boom' produced by e-commerce.

Tim Berners-Lee was concerned with the introduction of hypertext on the Internet, in the process of searching and retrieving documents. The notion exists, even the term Hypertext had already been introduced by Ted Nelson (1965). The problems and advantages of browsing information organized as hypertext had already been analyzed by Doag Engelbart, creator of an online system and inventor of the mouse.

Tim Berners-Lee wrote back in 1980, during his internship at CERN, a "notebook" program entitled "Enquire-Within-Upon-Everything", which allows connections between arbitrary nodes. Each node is characterized by a title, a type and a list of bidirectional links. The program ran on Norsk Data machines under the SINTRAN-III operating system.

In March 1989, Tim Berners-Lee wrote: "Information management: A proposal", published for comment at CERN. Accompanied by the work "Hypertext and CERN". The basic idea was to access documents based on what we now call URLs. After several debates and reruns, in September, his boss, Mike Sendal, buys a NeXT computer (one of the supercomputers of the time) and allows him to get to work. It was May 1990.

In October, Tim was already working on a graphical interface browser and related editor. Using the NeXTStep development environment. During this time, the project is reformulated in cooperation with Robert Cailliau, so that, when the first Web server becomes functional, the first page visible with the help of the browser that is still developing, was even TheProject.html, with the complete coordinates:

Student Nicola Pellow manages to make a line mode navigator (like the current lynx), so that at Christmas 1990 both his simple navigator and the one made by Tim barners-Lee, combined with an editor and a graphical interface, were demonstrable. Access to hypertext files and newsgroups was possible.

In 1991 the project began to be presented in various groups at CERN, and in June the first computer seminar was organized using this system, ie on the WWW.

Since August 1991, the files constituting the server, browsers and web page editor have been made available to those interested, accessible via ftp, and even broadcast within the groups alt.hypertext, comp.sys.next, comp.text.sgml, and comp. mail.multimedia. In October, the www-interest and www-talk@info.cern.ch e-mail lists will start working, and anonymous telnet access will be introduced on the info.cern.ch Web server. Bridges between WWW and WAIS, respectively VMS, are also installed. / HELP.

In early December, 1991, in San Antonio, Texas, the Hypertext'91 conference took place, where Tim Berners-Lee presented a poster and demonstrated the system. Also in those days the W3 navigator is installed on VMS / CMS, and the CERN Computers Newsletter announces the W3 navigator of the HEP (high energy physics) community.

In this context, the physicist Paul Kunz, from SLAC (Center working closely with CERN), who was attending a conference in Geneva in September, where, according to his own testimony, Tim Berners-Lee showed him what it was about, when he returned home, he installed the Web server program and, together with his collaborators (Louise Addis, George Crane, Tony Johnson, Joan Winters and Bebo White), created several HTML documents linking to the Centre's electronic library. According to reports, the SLAC website has been accessible / visible since December 12 at 4 pm. It is certain that Tim Berners-Lee sent an e-mail on Friday, December 13 on the lists www-interest@cernvax.cern.ch and www-talk @ cernvax.cern.ch, with a copy for Paul Kunz, at pfkeb@kaon.slac.stanford.edu, announces:

Unlike the project presentation page, used by Tim in demonstrations, the SLAC page allowed browsing through library documents, previously accessible only with ftp. As a result, when, a month later, during a public presentation at the AIHEP'92 conference in France, Tim Berners-Lee demonstratively accesses the Stanford server, some of the participants seem to have sensed the great achievement.

The SLAC team formed the WWW-Wizards group, which seriously contributed to the development and popularization of this newly introduced service on the Internet. Tony Johnson will also make a navigator, called Midas and available since January 1993 right in the X environment (just like the VIOLA navigator, made by Pei Wei from O'Reilly Associates).

There were already about 50 Web servers in operation in early 1993, when the first version of the MOSAIC graphical browser appeared, developed by Marc Andreesen, who later founded and ran Netscape. Mosaic includes many of the features of the Midas browser, being designed for the Unix XWindows environment.

In March, traffic due to the World Wide Web, measured in NSF nodes, reached 0.1%. WWW is present at the Online Publishing'93 conference in Pittsburg.

Details about that period, the SLAC team documents and even the 'commemorated' Web page can now be found at: The Early World Wide Web at SLAC: Early Chronology and Documents (1991-1994)

Paul Kunz recounts many of the details of the appearance of the World Wide Web in a conference at InterLab'99

There is no doubt that the Web has established itself, gaining ground in competition with Gopher (Internet service also launched in 1991 and operating with menus), by the simplicity and universality of access (the idea of ??identifying documents by URLs), by the advantage offered by the link system offered. of hypertext and, implicitly, of the HTML language, on which it is based. For the first time, documents 'handled' via the Internet lose the monotony of the text with the same font, include graphs or tables, later figures and even animated sequences and sound. The MOSAIC browser, a forerunner of Netscape Navigator, Internet Explorer and other current browsers, also had a special merit. But it was also important how the principles of the project and one by one all the component programs were made public, with sources broadcast on e-mail lists and available via FTP. Moreover, on 30 April 1993, CERN's statement on the public nature of the World Wide Web technology appeared.

Soon after, Ari Luotonen rewrites the httpd program - the core of the Web server, implementing access permissions as well. In August 1993, the first WWW Wizards workshop took place in Cambridge Massachusetts. In September, web traffic through NSF nodes reaches 1%. Operational versions of MOSAIC appear for both MS Windows and Macintosh PCs. As of October, there were already 200 Web servers up and running, including one at the White House. The first European web-based project is launched. The first conference on the World Wide Web is announced in Geneva, between May 25-27, 1994. The conference was attended by over 800 people (of whom 400 were selected). The conference emphasized the importance of the WWW for education, the materials being still available at TECFA. In June 1994, more than 1,500 web servers were already registered.

Launched as a tool to support the cooperation of physical researchers, the World Wide Web has become almost synonymous with the Internet in just a few years. Although neither browsers nor Web page editors have yet reached the performance dreamed of by Tim Berners-Lee, the World Wide Web has become the world's largest library, with over 3 billion documents today. This development has led to the emergence of new trades, and the reorganization of many activities taking into account the conditions of Web advertising and the possibilities of cooperation hard to imagine in the past. With the help of Web training environments and with the informational and educational resources uploaded on the Web, training and continuous improvement become accessible to almost anyone. More,

Note:

The birth date of the Internet is somewhat debatable: Some authors consider 1969 as the time when ARPANET connected computers at the Stanford Research Institute, the University of California Los Angeles, the University of California Santa Barbara and the University of Utah. Other authors, including Tim Berners-Lee, consider the date of the birth of the Internet in 1974, the time of separation of the academic part from military research, with the establishment of the Telenet network by Bolt, Beranek & Newman .; Finally, others, including Paul Kunz of Stanford, believe that the Internet only appeared in 1982, when the name was first used and when Bob Kahn, Vint Cerf and others defined and implemented the TCP / IP protocol - considered the language Internet communication. For the entire chronology and evolution of the Internet you can consult: Net Timeline, Vint Cerf ' s Brief History of the Internet, Hobbes' Internet Timeline, etc. The most complete list of Web resources in this field is available from the Internet Society (ISOC) All About The Internet: History of the Internet

Tim Berners-Lee's testimonies can be found at: Tim Berners-Lee: A short history of web development, or more frequently in Frequently asked questions by the Press, respectively in the book Weaving the Web