· What is CERN? · Who started the World Wide Web? ·Links ·
The European Center for Particle Physics Research is in Switzerland.
Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web with a team of software engineers and a computer programmer to help integrate the information that was spread over many different computers and several computing platforms.
He did so by developing tools such as the
Tim was inspired in part by his frustration with a uselessly complicated computer network as well as with new developments in computer software programming as developed by Steve Jobs, the co-founder of Apple Computer, who was now running a computer company called NeXT.
Once again from Shahrooz Feizabadi:
It all began when Tim Berners-Lee, a graduate of Oxford University, got frustrated with the fact that his daily schedule planner, his list of phone numbers, and his documents were stored in different databases on different machines thus making it difficult to access them simultaneously. He set out to fix this problem. The year was 1980, and the place was CERN...
Tim Berners-Lee started working at CERN (Centre European pour la Recherche Nucleaire -or- European Laboratory for Particle Physics) as a consultant in 1980. At that time, several platform dependent and proprietary information storage and retrieval methods were being used at CERN. Additionally, several systems such as "CERNET" and "FOCUS" were developed in-house. In general, as with other institutions, data was stored and manipulated in isolated machines with practically no interaction or connectivity. Tim Berners-Lee's data was scattered over several such systems. He wished to develop a system that would allow him, for example, to summon quickly and automatically a mailing address for the receiver of a letter he might be composing.
"I wanted a program that could store random associations between arbitrary pieces of information," he recounts.His first program to address this issue was "Enquire-Within-Upon-Everything", "Enquire" for short. The name for the program was based on an 1856 book "Enquire Within Upon Everything," a how-to book for the Victorian era. In a recent interview, Berners-Lee said that at the time of creation of "Enquire," he had only been marginally exposed to the ideas of Ted Nelson, and the concept of hypertext. At the time, he was simply concerned with solving a technical problem he was facing at CERN. [W3C]
Berners-Lee left CERN not too long after the completion of the "Enquire" system, which went mostly unused after his departure. He worked as a consultant in the area of networking, and made contributions to the RPC (Remote Procedure Call) system. In the mean time, the Internet and TCP/IP were introduced at CERN in 1984. By 1989 CERN had become the largest Internet site in Europe. In 1989 Tim Berners-Lee returned to CERN. The "computing culture" at CERN revolved around the then new ideas of distributed computing and object-oriented programming. Berners-Lee's background in network and socket programming was completely consistent with the new ways of computing at CERN.
Additionally, with the advent of revolutionary object oriented technologies introduced by NeXT, rapid systems development and prototyping in a UNIX environment had become more feasible. The conditions were just right...
Advanced Research Project Agency Centre Européen de Recherche Nucléaire Email Configuring your Email Software Search Engines The Information Superhighway Hypertext and Xanadu The Transatlantic Link
Note: This site is intended for in-class HTML demonstration purposes only.