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1.1. Long, Long Ago...in Internet TimeBefore the Web was developed, there were several ways to communicate over the Internet, including the still ubiquitous email, Telnet (used to log into machines remotely and run programs on a command line), Usenet (otherwise known as newsgroups), and FTP (which allows people to download software and other items). There was even something called Gopher, which allowed users to navigate through folders arranged in an outline-like structure to find the desired information. All of these Internet technologies (with the exception of email) lacked something that would have made their use more widespread, be it ease of use, simplicity, or a sufficiently wide assortment of available resources. Tim Berners-Lee, a scientist at CERN (the Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucleaire, or European Organization for Nuclear Research, a European physics lab), developed the World Wide Web in 1990 as a means for scientists to share narrative documents without having to worry about operating systems or word-processing software. Documents (and soon, images) were stored on web servers, computers that patiently listen for requests for particular pages or pictures and then respond with the asked-for items. The software making the requests became known as a web browser, the idea being that using the Web was so easy that a user could simply browse for the desired information.
The first web browsers were simple, crude affairs, although they were amazing at the time. You could actually connect easily to other computers and view information that people had made availableand, even more amazing, you could use hyperlinks to jump from resource to resource! The Web was initially developed on computers made by NeXT (the company Steve Jobs started after he was forced out of Apple in 1985), and since NeXT machines could display icons, menus, and pictures, the first web browser could also display both text and images. [click here] shows it in action. Confusingly, Berners-Lee gave the first browser he developed the same name as the thing it was viewing; in other words, you used WorldWideWeb to view the World Wide Web! However, since most people weren't using NeXT machines in those days, Berners-Lee also decided to release a text-only browser that would work with almost any computer, and over Telnet, then one of the main ways people accessed the Internet. Figure 1-2 shows what this early web browserknown as the CERN line-mode browserlooked like (although the browser in the picture is viewing a very modern web page at http://www.wikipedia.org). This was not a graphical browser at all; instead, it was all text, all the time. To move from link to link, you had to type in a number at the bottom of the screen and then press Enter. There was no idea of a home page, or bookmarks, or any of the other browser features that we now take for granted. But folks who knew about the Web at this time found the line-mode browser, and the CERN WorldWideWeb browser if they could run it, a revelation.
Some people who encountered the Web in its infancy were inspired to write their own web browsers. In those first few years, Tony Johnson developed Midas, and Pei-Yuan Wei created Viola (shown in [click here]) in 1991. Both could display graphics, tables, and forms, but both ran solely on Unix machines, which somewhat limited their popularity (remember, Windows 3.0/3.1 was Microsoft's operating system at the time, and Unix machines were still light years ahead of computers running Windows). In April 1993, Berners-Lee made a decision so far-reaching that it is directly responsible for the book you are reading now: he convinced CERN to certify that the Web and all associated CERN code should be released into the public domain. In other words, no one would own the Web, and there would be no tolls charged to anyone who wanted to use the Web or develop technologies to work with it. Berners-Leeand CERNthus chose not to profit directly from the Web, which was an amazingly generous, thoughtful, and visionary act. If CERN had insisted on licensing the technology, it never would have spread like it did. We would today have islands of disconnected webs accessible only by separate groups of subscribers, instead of the universal availability that lays open the Web to all of us.
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