For many of us, Web Browsing has become a daily activity. Whether it is used for checking stock prices, shopping, or just larking about, web browsing has become an institution in our lives much the way TV is. But have you ever wondered how it all works? This post is meant to explain the history of the web and how it technically works.
The Web began at CERN, the European Organization for Particle Physics Research, in 1989 when Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau designed a system called Enquire.
This system would allow documents to have links between different pieces of data whether they be files on the local computer or stored on a remote computer. The main motivation is said to have been the ability to access library information that was spread across multiple servers at CERN.
On November 12th, 1990, Tim Berners-Lee published a formal proposal called "Information Management: A Proposal" that outlined the web as we know it today by using a system for displaying information called HyperText. This system was first described in 1945 by a man named Vannever Bush to link documents into a large scale information pool.
One day after the proposal was published, Tim Berners-Lee created the first web page. And that following December wrote the first web browser and web server.
The name of this program that was created, was called the WorldWideWeb. Thus the name we use today.
As development of the WorldWideWeb continued, more people from around the world started to get involved. In 1992, one of the first web browsers that supported graphics was introduced called Pei-Yuan Wei's Viola. This led to Marc Andreessen of NCSA releasing a program for UNIX called Mosaic in 1993.
Mosaic was the spark that marked the rise in popularity of the World Wide Web and no longer kept it confined in the academic circles. Marc Andreesen went on to form Mosaic Communications, which then evolved into Netscape Communications. Netscape was the first mainstream graphical Web Browser.
As time went on, more features started to be added to the web browser, more companies got on the internet, and personal pages started springing up everywhere, and the web as we now know it was born.
More in Part 2: The Technology.
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