It must be understood that these bodies are composed of individuals who often serve on more than one body. Therefore there is a lot of synergy and cooperation, but the goals of each body are quite well-defined, separate and not to be confused.

Robert Cailliau , Paris, November 1995

	"The key words that came to my mind while writing this history were: synergy, serendipity and coincidence".
	Ben Segal

A comprehensive and fascinating overview of the philosophy and history of the Internet . Many related links and a section on pertinent statistics. From Internet Valley, a Sacramento, California Internet consulting and publishing company.

Road 1: USA to Europe

Information Age Milestones:  

1866: "In the beginning was the Cable..."

1972: First public demonstration of  ARPANET

In late 1971, Larry Roberts at DARPA decided that people needed serious motivation to get things going. In October 1972 there was to be an International Conference on Computer Communications, so Larry asked Bob Kahn at BBN to organize a public demonstration of the ARPANET .

It took Bob about a year to get everybody far enough along to demonstrate a bunch of applications on the ARPANET . The idea was that we would install a packet switch and a Terminal Interface Processor or TIP in the basement of the Washington Hilton Hotel, and actually let the public come in and use the ARPANET, running applications all over the U.S ....

The demo was a roaring success, much to the surprise of the people at AT&T who were skeptical about whether it would work.

Source: Vinton Cerf

 

See also:	The Birth of the ARPANET DARPA-Internet History Internet Timeline: 1836 - 1997 Internet Background Web Guide : Hyper-Links Community

Road #2. Europe to USA: Internet at CERN

The history of every great invention is based on a lot of pre-history. In the case of the World-Wide Web, there are two lines to be traced: the development of hypertext , or the computer-aided reading of electronic documents, and the development of the Internet protocols which made the global network possible.

by Robert Cailliau , Text of a speech delivered at the launching of the European branch of the W3 Consortium , Paris, November 1995 

As  usually...

In the beginning was - chaos .

In the same way that the theory of high energy physics interactions was itself in a chaotic state up until the early 1970's, so was the so-called area of "Data Communications" at CERN. The variety of different techniques, media and protocols used was staggering; open warfare existed between many manufacturers' proprietary systems, various home-made systems (including CERN's own "FOCUS" and "CERNET"), and the then rudimentary efforts at defining open or international standards...

The Stage is Set - early 1980's.

To my knowledge, the first time any "Internet Protocol" was used at CERN was during the second phase of the STELLA Satellite Communication Project, from 1981-83, when a satellite channel was used to link remote segments of two early local area networks (namely "CERNET", running between CERN and Pisa, and a Cambridge Ring network running between CERN and Rutherford Laboratory). This was certainly inspired by the ARPA IP model, known to the Italian members of the STELLA collaboration (CNUCE, Pisa) who had ARPA connections...

TCP/IP Introduced at CERN.

In August, 1984 I wrote a proposal to the SW Group Leader, Les Robertson, for the establishment of a pilot project to install and evaluate TCP/IP protocols on some key non-Unix machines at CERN including the central IBM-VM mainframe and a VAX VMS system....

By 1990 CERN had become the largest Internet site in Europe and this fact, as mentioned above, positively influenced the acceptance and spread of Internet techniques both in Europe and elsewhere...

The Web Materializes.

A key result of all these happenings was that by 1989 CERN's Internet facility was ready to become the medium within which Tim Berners-Lee would create the World Wide Web with a truly visionary idea. In fact an entire culture had developed at CERN around "distributed computing", and Tim had himself contributed in the area of Remote Procedure Call (RPC), thereby mastering several of the tools that he needed to synthesize the Web such as software portability techniques and network and socket programming. But there were many other details too, like how simple it had become to configure a state of the art workstation for Internet use (in this case Tim's NeXT machine which he showed me while he was setting it up in his office), and how once on the Internet it was possible to attract collaborators to contribute effort where that was lacking at CERN.

By Ben M. Segal / CERN PDP-NS / April, 1995

Road #1 | Road #2 | | Web | Road #3 | Hypertext | Xanadu | Statistics | Conclusion
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The Web as a Side Effect
of the 40 years of Particle Physics Experiments.
The fragment from  author email discussions with Ben Segal

 

Ben, It happened many times during history of science that the most impressive results of large scale scientific efforts appeared far away from the main directions of those efforts. I hope you agree that Web was a side effect of the CERN's scientific agenda. After the World War 2 the nuclear centers of almost all developed countries became the places with the highest concentration of talented scientists. During last four decades many of them were invited to the international CERN's Laboratories. So specific kind of the CERN's intellectual "entire culture" (as you called it) was constantly growing from one generation of the scientists and engineers to another, and so on... When the current concentration of the human talents per square foot of the CERN's Labs reached the critical mass, it caused an intellectual explosion The Web, -- crucial point of human's history, was born... Nothing could be compared to it. You wrote the best about it: "synergy, serendipity and coincidence"... We can't imagine yet the real scale of the recent shake, because there has not been so fast growing multidimension radically new social-economic processes in human history yet... Gregory Gromov P.S. It is quite remarkable that "Highlights of CERN History: 1949 - 1994" do not have a word about Web. So, it looks like a classic side effect that normally is not be mentioned at the main text of official record...




Return-Path: Date: Thu, 23 May 1996 08:47:54 +0200 From: ben@dxcern.cern.ch (Ben Segal) To: view@netvalley.com Subject: Gregory, here are some CERN... > I hope you agree that Web was a side effect of the CERN's scientific agenda. Absolutely! (And it was not 100% appreciated by the masters of CERN, the physicists and accelerator builders, that such a "side effect" with world shaking consequences was born in the obscure bit of the organization that handled computing, a relatively low-status activity...). Ben Segal

The Next Crossroad of Web History:

The first web client and server -- built with NEXTSTEP.

The WWW project was originally developed to provide a distributed hypermedia system which could easily access -- from any desktop computer -- information spread across the world.

The web includes standard formats for text, graphics, sound, and video which can be indexed easily and searched by all networked machines.

Using NeXT's object-oriented technology, the first Web server and client machines were built by CERN -- the European Laboratory for Particle Physics in November 1990. Since then the Web has truly encompassed the globe and access has proliferated across all computer platforms in both the corporate and home markets.

Source : NeXT Software, Inc., 1996

 

The Web as a NextStep of PC Revolution.   

From the IT history viewpoint, " in this case Tim 's NeXT machine which he showed me while he was setting it up in his office" was a crossroad of the two IT revolutions , or by the other words a symbolic handshake of the two IT revolutions' heroes:

Steven P. Jobs - a hero of the PC revolution;

Tim Berners-Lee - a hero of the Web revolution.

Why it was done in CERN:

1989

The HEP (High Energy Physics - IVI comm.) community is small but spread all over the world. The physics research laboratories of the world have many collaborations, and the exchange of data and documents is a primordial activity. This environment is naturally ready to accept a system that facilitates such communication over networks. The adoption of the Internet as the standard academic network by CERN and its fellow laboratories in the US made the ground very fertile indeed.

Late in the year 1989, Tim Berners-Lee proposes a networked Hypertext system for CERN.

Robert Cailliau independently proposes a hypertext project for documentation handling inside the laboratory.

by Robert Cailliau , European branch of the W3 Consortium,   1995   

12 November 1990 World WideWeb :

Proposal for a HyperText Project

To:

P.G. Innocenti/ECP, G. Kellner/ECP, D.O. Williams/CN

Cc:

R. Brun/CN, K. Gieselmann/ECP, R.€ Jones/ECP, T.€ Osborne/CN, P. Palazzi/ECP, N.€ Pellow/CN, B.€ Pollermann/CN, E.M.€ Rimmer/ECP

From:

T. Berners-Lee/CN, R. Cailliau/ECP

Date:

12 November 1990

... document describes in more detail a Hypertext project.
 

HyperText is a way to link and access information of various kinds as a web of nodes in which the user can browse at will. It provides a single user-interface to large classes of information (reports, notes, data-bases, computer documentation and on-line help). We propose a simple scheme incorporating servers already available at CERN.

The project has two phases: firstly we make use of existing software and hardware as well as implementing simple browsers for the user's workstations, based on an analysis of therequirements for information access needs by experiments. Secondly, we extend the application area by also allowing the users to add new material.

Phase one should take 3 months with the full manpower complement, phase two a further 3 months, but this phase is more open-ended, and a review of needs and wishes will be incorporated into it.

The manpower required is 4 software engineers and a programmer, (one of which could be a Fellow). Each person works on a specific part (eg. specific platform support)....
Tim Berners-Lee , R. Cailliau

1990

CERN: A Joint proposal for a hypertext system is presented to the management.

Mike Sendall buys a NeXT cube for evaluation, and gives it to Tim. Tim's prototype implementation on NeXTStep is made in the space of a few months, thanks to the qualities of the NeXTStep software development system. This prototype offers WYSIWYG browsing/authoring! Current Web browsers used in "surfing the Internet" are mere passive windows, depriving the user of the possibility to contribute.

During some sessions in the CERN cafeteria, Tim and I try to find a catching name for the system. I was determined that the name should not yet again be taken from Greek mythology. Tim proposes "World-Wide Web". I like this very much, except that it is difficult to pronounce in French...

1991

The prototype is very impressive, but the NeXTStep system is not widely spread. A simplified, stripped-down version (with no editing facilities) that can be easily adapted to any computer is constructed: the Portable "Line-Mode Browser".

SLAC, the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center in California, becomes the first Web server in USA. It serves the contents of an existing, large data base of abstracts of physics papers.

Distribution of software over the Internet starts.

The Hypertext'91 conference (San Antonio) allows us a "poster" presentation (but does not see any use of discussing large, networked hypertext systems...).

1992

The portable browser is released by CERN as freeware.

Many HEP laboratories now join with servers: DESY (Hamburg), NIKHEF (Amsterdam), FNAL (Chicago).

Interest in the Internet population picks up.

The Gopher system from the University of Minnesota, also networked, simpler to install, but with no hypertext links, spreads rapidly.

We need to make a Web browser for the X system, but have no in-house expertise. However, Viola (O'Reilly Assoc., California) and Midas (SLAC) are wysiwyg implementations that create great interest.

The world has 50 Web servers!

"information superhighway"

Tipper Gore:"When my husband Vice President Gore served in the House of Representatives, he coined the phrase "information superhighway" to describe how this exciting new medium would one day transport us all. Since then, we have seen the Internet and World Wide Web revolutionize the way people interact, learn, and communicate."

Photo of Tipper and Al Gore wedding: 20-th year BW (before Web)

Road #1 | Road #2 | | Web | Road #3 | Hypertext | Xanadu | Statistics | Conclusion
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Just a little bit of the inventor' personal inside clarifications:

W W Why are they green?
"Because I see all "W "s as green..."

Robert Cailliau: Recently I discovered that I'm a synaesthetic. Well, I've known it for a long time, but I did not realise that there was a name for it. I'm one of those people who combine two senses: for me, letters have colours. Only about one in 25'000 have this condition, which is perfectly harmless and actually quite useful. Whenever I think of words, they have colour patterns. For example, the word "CERN" is yellow, green, red and brown, my internal telephone number, "5005" is black, white, white, black. The effect sometimes works like a spelling checker: I know I've got the right or the wrong number because the colour pattern is what I remember or not...

And now wait for it folks: you have all seen the World- Wide Web logo of three superimposed "W"s. Why are they green? Because I see all "W"s as green...
It would look horrible to me if they were any other colour.
So, it's not because it is a "green" technology, although I also like that...

So, here I am: twenty years of work at CERN: control engineering, user-interfaces, text processing, administrative computing support,
hypertexts and finally the Web.

Copyright CERN

The first 5 years of the WWW
 

The Web reminds me of early days of the PC industry. No one really knows anything . All experts have been wrong.

Steve Jobs, Wired, February 1996
 

In the Web's first generation, Tim Berners-Lee launched the Uniform Resource Locator (URL), Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), and HTML standards with prototype Unix-based servers and browsers.

A few people noticed that the
Web might be better than Gopher.

In the second generation, Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina developed NCSA Mosaic at the University of Illinois.

Several million then suddenly noticed that the
Web might be better than sex .
 

In the third generation, Andreessen and Bina left NCSA to found Netscape...

By Bob Metcalfe , InfoWorld , August 21, 1995, Vol. 17, Issue 34.

 

 

See also:

NCSA, Marc Andreessen and first Mosaic -- graphical browser for the WWW WWW Timeline: 1989 - 1995 ...

Road # 3. USA to Far East 

 

The 50 years of the HYPERTEXT concept's evolution :      

The  WWW Science History and "Living History"
 

Part 1. The History of Hypertext
 

Hypertext Timeline:  

Main Source: CERN

1945: Vannevar Bush (Science Advisor to president Roosevelt during WW2) proposes Memex -- a conceptual machine that can store vast amounts of information, in which users have the ability to create information trails, links of related texts and illustrations, which can be stored and used for future reference. This article was originally published in the July 1945 issue of The Atlantic Monthly : As We May Think ... Like Emerson's famous address of 1837 on ``The American Scholar,'' this paper by Vannevar Bush calls for a new relationship between thinking man and the sum of our knowledge .

1965: Ted Nelson coins the word "Hypertext".

1967: Andy van Dam and others build the Hypertext Editing System ...

1981: Ted Nelson conceptualizes " Xanadu", a central, pay-per-document hypertext database encompassing all written information. ...

Part 2. The "Living History" of Hypertext.

Theodor Holm Nelson

Fate of Thinking Person in Silicon Valley

1960. It occurs to me that the future of humanity is at the interactive computer screen, that the new writing and movies will be interactive and interlinked . It will be united by bridges of transclusion (see below) and we need a world-wide network to deliver it with royalty. I begin.

.  .  .  .  .

February, 1988. Autodesk buys the Xanadu project, which has been bundled into XOC, Inc. Nelson gives up the trademark .

LATE 1988 the program designed in 1981 is finished (and dubbed 88.1), then set aside, to begin work on a MUCH FINER design-

August, 1992. Autodesk drops the project and gives us carfare. Our heroes find themselves out in the street.

Interesting Times Number Three, October 1994,
Theodor Holm Nelson , Mindful Press, 1994

 


Japanese Embrace	After a Years Failure in U.S. ,
A Man Too Eccentric For Silicon Valley	Theodor Nelson Continues His Quest for Xanadu

  

SAPPORO, Japan - Eagger to inspire a creative new generation of computer programmers, Japan hax turned to a U.S. software guru who has been called "one of the great minds of the 20th century" and "the Orson Welles of software."

So far, it hardly matters that the individual in question, Theodor Holm Nelson, has been called those things by himself . Or that in U.S. he has spent more than 30 years and large sums of other people's money on never finished  Xanadu, which has bankrupted one group of programmers and overhelmed several others.

For Japan has accorded Mr. Nelson a hero's welcom. A group of electronics giants, including Hitachi Ltd. and Futjitsu Ltd., built a 12-person software lab for him on Japan's northernmost island and named it Hyperlab, where he dreamed, desighed and philosophed for a year and half. More recenrtly Keo University has given him a research appointment at its campus near Tokyo, where he plans to continue building Xanadu with companies or students who care to help.

In Japan, many still revere Mr. Nelson for his 1965 "hypertext" concept -- essentially the system that allows users of the Internet's WorldWideWeb to mouse-click their way from words or pictures in one document to those in another. "He is {part of] the living history of the computer world,"...

By David P. Hamilton, WSJ, April 24, 1996, p 1, A10.


• 
  

"...after the Advisory Committee meeting of the WWW Consortium, in Tokyo, June 1997. This one (photo -- GRG) was made by Hakon Lie at dinner.     It shows me ( Robert Cailliau -- GRG), sitting between Tim Berners-Lee and Ted Nelson. Tim and Ted are clearly engaged in a serious debate about some hypertext phenomenon behind my back, while I'm discussing philosophy with Hakon , who was sitting opposite me and took the photo."

by R. Cailliau "Tim, Robert and Ted

 

Theodor Holm Nelson
A retort to Gary Wolf's "Curse of Xanadu" in Wired Magazine.  

Magazine:
Nelson's response to the Web was " nice try."

Nelson:
This is a pretty seriously out-of-context quote.

I have great respect for the Web and
great personal liking for Tim Berners-Lee .

Magazine:
Today, with the advent of far more powerful memory devices,

Xanadu , the grandest encyclopedic project of our era, seemed not only a failure but an actual symptom of madness.

 Nelson :
I find this both gratuitously nasty and incomprehensible.

What is he talking about with these
"more powerful memory devices"?

They do not change the problem or invalidate the proposed solution of transclusive media.

Xanadu Timeline :

• 1960 Ted Nelson's designs showed two screen windows connected by visible lines, pointing from parts of an object in one window to corresponding parts of an object in another window. No existing windowing software provides this facility even today.
• 1965 Nelson's design concentrated on the single-user system and was based on "zipper lists", sequential lists of elements which could be linked sideways to other zipper lists for large non-sequential text structures.
• 1970 Nelson invented certain data structures and algorithms called the "enfilade" which became the basis for much later work (still proprietary to Xanadu Operating Company, Inc.)
• 1972 Implementations ran in both Algol and Fortran.
• 1974 William Barus extended the enfilade concept to handle interconnection.
• 1979 Nelson assembled a new team (Roger Gregory, Mark Miller, Stuart Greene, Roland King and Eric Hill) to redesign the system.
• 1981K. Eric Drexler created a new data structure and algorithms for complex versioning and connection management.

The Project Xanadu team completed the design of a universal networking server for Xanadu, described in various editions of Ted Nelson's book "Literary Machines" ...

• 1983Xanadu Operating Company, Inc. (XOC , Inc.) was formed to complete development of the 1981 design.
• 1988XOC, Inc. was acquired by Autodesk, Inc. and amply funded, with offices in Palo Alto and later Mountain View California. Work continued with Mark Miller as chief designer. ..
• 1992 Autodesk entered into the throes of an organisational shakeup and dropped the project, after expenditures on the order of five million US dollars. Rights to continued development of the XOC server were licensed to Memex, Inc. of Palo Alto, California and the trademark "Xanadu" was re-assigned to Nelson.
• 1993 Nelson re-thought the whole thing and respecified Xanadu publishing as a system of business arrangements. Minimal specifications for a publishing system were created under the name "Xanadu Light", and Andrew Pam of Serious Cybernetics in Melbourne, Australia was licensed to continue development as Xanadu Australia.
• 1994 Nelson was invited to Japan and founded the Sapporo HyperLab...

By Andrew Pam, Xanadu Australia

• 
  
  

  You might want also to find out some more colorful details regarding above mentioned dialogue and some other events of the Hypertext History in previous 9 page version of our Net&Web Story

  
  
  

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  ---

  
  

  Growth of Internet:
  Statistics and Suggestions

   

Percentage increase in Internet traffic, per month: 30

 

	Percentage of U.S. public schools connected to the Internet
1994	35
1996	65

Number of Internet Service Providers (ISPs) in the U.S. and Canada, in August, 1997 : 4,133

Number of ISP, worldwide in July, 1996 : 3,054

Average number of customers at an ISP: 1,850

Percentage of CIOs planning to increase Internet spending significantly in 1998: 31

Data source: Win Trees

 

---

The Stats Map of Net History

30 Years of the Net in Brief  Stats Story

* / The total number of the all types of Domains (com mercial -- com.; non-profit organizations -- org.; educational ... --- edu.; ... etc.)
**/The IVI    estimations

***/The WebSites to Hosts Ratio ( WHR):

WHR very approximately (! ) estimates the percent  of content active  part of Net community.  By other words, WHR reflects what is the percent of Web surfing people that are trying to  become the  Web authors by creating their own Web sites. So we ( - G.R.G ) consider the WHR as a creative temperature of  Web

See also: Internet Trends -- the most impressive of Internet stats related colorfull slide collections (by Tony Rutkovsky). Check it out!
Internet Domain Survey ( by Network Wizards)

CyberStats Survey ( by Federation of American Scientists)

Road #1 | Road #2 | | Web | Road #3 | Hypertext | Xanadu | Statistics | Conclusion
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The History Conclusion and
Future Forecast...

The Net is a unique creation of human intelligence. The Net is the first intelligent artificial organism. The Net represents the growth of a new society within the old. The Net represents a new model of governance. The Net represents a threat to civil liberties. The Net is the greatest free marketplace of ideas that has ever existed. The Net is in imminent danger of extinction. The Net is immortal.

By Henry Edward Hardy The History of the Net,
Master's Thesis, September 28, 1993

 

...the Internet revolution has challenged the corporate-titan model of the information superhighway. The growth of the Net is not a fluke or a fad, but the consequence of unleashing the power of individual creativity. If it were an economy, it would be the triumph of the free market over central planning. In music, jazz over Bach. Democracy over dictatorship...

By Christopher Anderson. The Economist Newspaper Limited.

 

by Alberto Cavicchiolo, Cybersphere 10, 1996

The Word 's Milestones of Net & Web History

Copyright 1998 © G.Gromov 

• 
  
  

  Return-Path: Date: Sun, 20 Oct 1996 21:21:34 -0400 From: BRUCECLYN@aol.com To: view@netvalley.com Subject: Comments to :View from Internet Valley   Your site is riveting history - but, what are the practical differences between the Internet and the World Wide Web ? You describe a continuous evolution of a system and I, for one, don't know the practical differences between the manmade information links whose terms are commonly bandied about in the press Please respond - enquiring minds want to know. Sincerely, Bruce D. Clyne

   

  Dear Bruce, . . . >what are the practical differences >between the Internet and the World Wide Web? The Internet is a global networks' system that consist of the millions of local area networks (LANs) and computers (hosts). So it's a tech system that is working according to the basic computer science concepts and rules. It was developed 25 - 30 years ago. The WWW is only one of the ways of practical implementations of the Internet. Some of the other ways are the following ones: gophers -- the dispersed system of menu driven subject oriented data bases; ftp -- the remote files' exchange system; email systems, and so on... The WWW (that was born 5 years ago) is a method (and system) that provides the members of the Internet's community with historically new opportunity to create and permanently develop the global field of the texts (as well as images, animations, sounds, etc.), all parts of which are able to crossconnect with each others. In other words, the WWW is a fast growing (millions of authors are adding new pages every day) global field of text that consist of billions of words (as well as sounds, images, animations, ... etc.) all (!) parts (every of billions of WORDs) of which are able to realtime crossconnect and interact with each others. As it was mentioned by Alberto Cavicchiolo, "the network is not a computer science concept, but a linguistic concept". I often quote this definition, even though I do not fully agree with it. From my viewpoint the network itself is definitely a computer science concept. The Internet is a computer science concept as well as biological concept. ... the Web (!) only "... is not a computer science concept, but a linguistic concept". So my definition of the Web is the following one: The Web is a method (and technology) of the global WORDS' fields dynamic crossconnection and interaction (again, I mean the words, as well as all other communication symbols: the images, animations, sounds and so on...). The Web uses the Internet to store, locate and connect the WORDS as some of the others more tradition methods of the WORDS's connection used the stones, skins, papyruses, papers, phone, recorders, radio, TV ... The phone teleconferences, some of the radio and TV shows and tele-reportages were partly using the Web's basic hyperlink approach. The hyperlinks concept itself was known for thousands of years . For instance, some of the Bible stories include different source stories inside the main story, and those source stories contane some other sourse stories and so on... All those well known attempts to use hyperlinks concept had one technical disadvantage: they were based on the static, fully prediscribed scenarios of the WORDS' crossconnections . There were strong crossconnection levels limits, link's delay time limits, and so on.. The WWW has broken any limits for any WORDS' crosconnections. After that the "chain reaction" of crossconnections was launched... For instance, according to the Sun Microsystems' statistics "the total number of the Internet's sites crossconnections more than doubled every month". (Sun press-seminar , January 1995, Mountain View, CA). . . . Once again, thank you for your interest. Sincerely, Gregory R. Gromov

   

  
  
  Comments-98: An additonal illustration of some of the above mentioned hyperlink dynamic concepts becomes the fast growing this story centric hyperlink community itself
  
  
  
  

  Epilogue and Prologue...

  The Web 's Way
  to the WORD's WORLD

  In the beginning was the WORD ...

  The WWW creates a multidimencional Web of Roads. Those Roads have their beginning at the civilization that was raised on a concept of a plane BOOK; the civilization that has existed for thousands of years.

  The Hyperlinks -- Roads of WWW -- lead from a BOOK of a plane text to the multidimencional Universe of WORD s, to the WORD's WORLD, which becomes the kernel concept of the next civilization...

   

  Suggestions, thoughts, questions? Contact us...

  

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