{"id":1258,"date":"2014-08-06T12:44:19","date_gmt":"2014-08-06T16:44:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.newsgroupdirect.com\/?p=1258"},"modified":"2014-08-06T12:44:19","modified_gmt":"2014-08-06T16:44:19","slug":"23rd-anniversary-of-tim-berners-lees-announcement-of-the-www-on-usenet","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/newsgroupdirect.com\/blog\/2014\/08\/06\/23rd-anniversary-of-tim-berners-lees-announcement-of-the-www-on-usenet\/","title":{"rendered":"23rd Anniversary of Tim Berners-Lee’s Announcement of the WWW on Usenet"},"content":{"rendered":"

Today is an important date in the history of both usenet and the world-wide-web. On August 6, 1991 Tim Berners-Lee<\/a> (while working at CERN in Switzerland) announced his idea for the WorldWideWeb on the usenet group alt.hypertext. The post was one of the most important\u00a0steps in bringing the modern communication age into existence.<\/p>\n

Tim Berners-Lee’s Original Post<\/h3>\n

The following is a copy of the original post (minor formatting changes made).<\/p>\n

\n

In article <64…@cernvax.cern.ch> I promised to post a short summary of the\u00a0WorldWideWeb project. Mail me with any queries.<\/span><\/p>\n

WorldWideWeb – Executive Summary<\/span><\/p>\n

The WWW project merges the techniques of information retrieval and hypertext to\u00a0make an easy but powerful global information system.<\/span><\/p>\n

The project started with the philosophy that much academic information should\u00a0be freely available to anyone. It aims to allow information sharing within\u00a0internationally dispersed teams, and the dissemination of information by\u00a0support groups.<\/span><\/p>\n

Reader view<\/span><\/p>\n

The WWW world consists of documents, and links. Indexes are special documents\u00a0which, rather than being read, may be searched. The result of such a search is\u00a0another (“virtual”) document containing links to the documents found. A simple\u00a0protocol (“HTTP”) is used to allow a browser program to request a keyword\u00a0search by a remote information server.<\/span><\/p>\n

The web contains documents in many formats. Those documents which are\u00a0hypertext, (real or virtual) contain links to other documents, or places\u00a0within documents. All documents, whether real, virtual or indexes, look similar\u00a0to the reader and are contained within the same addressing scheme.<\/span><\/p>\n

To follow a link, a reader clicks with a mouse (or types in a number if he or\u00a0she has no mouse). To search and index, a reader gives keywords (or other\u00a0search criteria). These are the only operations necessary to access the entire\u00a0world of data.<\/span><\/p>\n

Information provider view<\/span><\/p>\n

The WWW browsers can access many existing data systems via existing protocols\u00a0(FTP, NNTP) or via HTTP and a gateway. In this way, the critical mass of data\u00a0is quickly exceeded, and the increasing use of the system by readers and\u00a0information suppliers encourage each other.<\/span><\/p>\n

Making a web is as simple as writing a few SGML files which point to your\u00a0existing data. Making it public involves running the FTP or HTTP daemon, and\u00a0making at least one link into your web from another. In fact, any file\u00a0available by anonymous FTP can be immediately linked into a web. The very small\u00a0start-up effort is designed to allow small contributions. At the other end of\u00a0the scale, large information providers may provide an HTTP server with full\u00a0text or keyword indexing.<\/span><\/p>\n

The WWW model gets over the frustrating incompatibilities of data format\u00a0between suppliers and reader by allowing negotiation of format between a smart\u00a0browser and a smart server. This should provide a basis for extension into\u00a0multimedia, and allow those who share application standards to make full use of\u00a0them across the web.<\/span><\/p>\n

This summary does not describe the many exciting possibilities opened up by the\u00a0WWW project, such as efficient document caching. the reduction of redundant\u00a0out-of-date copies, and the use of knowledge daemons. There is more\u00a0information in the online project documentation, including some background on\u00a0hypertext and many technical notes.<\/span><\/p>\n

Try it<\/span><\/p>\n

A prototype (very alpha test) simple line mode browser is currently available\u00a0in source form from node info.cern.ch [currently 128.141.201.74] as \/pub\/WWW\/WWWLineMode_0.9.tar.Z.<\/span><\/p>\n

Also available is a hypertext editor for the NeXT using the NeXTStep graphical\u00a0user interface, and a skeleton server daemon.<\/span><\/p>\n

Documentation is readable using www (Plain text of the instalation instructions\u00a0is included in the tar file!). Document http:\/\/info.cern.ch\/hypertext\/WWW\/TheProject.html is as good a place to start as any. Note these coordinates may change with later releases.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Today is an important date in the history of both usenet and the world-wide-web. On August 6, 1991 Tim Berners-Lee (while working at CERN in Switzerland) announced his idea for the WorldWideWeb on the usenet group alt.hypertext. The post was one of the most important steps in bringing the modern communication age into existence.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1267,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[17,1],"tags":[202,6,201],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsgroupdirect.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1258"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsgroupdirect.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsgroupdirect.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsgroupdirect.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsgroupdirect.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1258"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/newsgroupdirect.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1258\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1260,"href":"https:\/\/newsgroupdirect.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1258\/revisions\/1260"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsgroupdirect.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1267"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsgroupdirect.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1258"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsgroupdirect.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1258"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsgroupdirect.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1258"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}