World Wide Web: Making Use of Internet Resources

In 1945, Vannevar Bush, director of the U.S. Office of Scientific Research and Development, published as article in The Atlantic Monthly entitled As We May Think. His proposal of a knowledge filing and retrieval system called Memex served as the first design of a Hypertext System, word that was coined by Ted Nelson about a decade later, which is a system that allows documents to have active links to other documents, allowing instant cross-referencing. For those familiar with programs used to develop many educational computer packages, Apple Computer's Hypercard and Macromedia's Director and Authorware make use of this system.

Although many experiments were performed using simple hypertext systems starting in the 1960's, it was the World Wide Web (WWW) that best demonstrated the ideas behind the hypertext system. In 1989, a project group led by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN (Conseil Europeen pour la Recherche Nucleaire), a particle physics lab, developed the World Wide Web. The researchers at the lab needed a way to share information and collaborate with each other and with other researchers around the world. They also wanted the information publicly available and have the ability to link to other research and information as it became available on the Web (short for World Wide Web).

In 1992, Marc Andreesen, a student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign who had a part-time job at the NCSA (National Center for Supercomputing Applications), developed a browser for the then entirely text-based Web called Mosaic. The application which allowed text and graphics on the same page led to the beginnings of the explosive growth of the Web. Other browsers were developed such as Netscape Communication Corporation's browser which we will be using in this course.

Today, a consortium called the World Wide Web Organization (W3O) formed between CERN and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) help coordinate future web developments and helps keep the Web from separating into incompatible Webs. However, due to the open structure of the Web, no one person or group actually controls the Web.