History of the Internet and the World Wide Web

The Internet had its roots during the 1960's as a project of the United States government's Department of Defense, to create a non-centralized network designed to survive partial outages (ie. nuclear war) and still function when parts of the network were down or destroyed. This project was called ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network), created by the Pentagon's Advanced Research Projects Agency established in 1969 to provide a secure and survivable communications network for organizations engaged in defense-related research.

In order to make the network more global a new sophisticated and standard protocol was needed. They developed IP (Internet Protocol) technology which defined how electronic messages were packaged, addressed, and sent over the network. The standard protocol was invented in 1977 and was called TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol). TCP/IP allowed users to link various branches of other complex networks directly to the ARPANet, which soon came to be called the Internet.

Researchers and academics in other fields began to make use of the network, and eventually the National Science Foundation (NSF), which had created a similar and parallel network called NSFNet, took over much of the TCP/IP technology from ARPANET and established a distributed network of networks capable of handling far greater traffic.

ARPANet grew during the 1970's, and was upgraded to a high speed network by linking several powerful supercomputer stations called nodes.

In 1985, the National Science Foundation (NSF) began a program to establish Internet access across the United States. They created a backbone called the NSFNET and opened their doors to all educational facilities, academic researchers, government agencies, and international research organizations. ARPANet was shut down by the Defense Communications Agency in 1989 due to limited funding and support from the military.

By the 1990's the Internet experienced explosive growth. It is estimated that the number of computers connected to the Internet was doubling every year. By mid-1994 the Internet connected an estimated two million computers in more than 100 countries, serving some 23 million users. Many commercial computer network and data services also provided at least indirect connection to the Internet. It was also estimated that at this rapid growth everyone in the world would have an e-mail address by the year 2000.

The World Wide Web

• An early talk about the Web gives some background on how the Web was originally conceived.

• A Short History of the Web. Text of a speech delivered at the launching of the European branch of the W3 Consortium Paris, 2 November 1995 by Robert Cailliau, CERN.

• People involved in developing the World Wide Web

• A time line from March 1989 to December 1994.

• Bibliography: Paper documentation on W3 and references.

• "A Short History of Internet Protocols at CERN" by Ben Segal, for some relevant pre-history.

A brief history of HTML: HTML was originally developed by Tim Berners-Lee while at CERN, and popularized by the Mosaic browser developed at NCSA. During the course of the 1990s it has blossomed with the explosive growth of the Web. During this time, HTML has been extended in a number of ways. The Web depends on Web page authors and vendors sharing the same conventions for HTML. This has motivated joint work on specifications for HTML.

Good history of HTML/the web reference, from Dave Raggett's HTML 4 book [Could also be seen as 'Raggett sets the record straight on Raggett' - there are 20 references to Raggett in this sample chapter. Still, a very informative and interesting story]. Included in this chapter is information on: How the World Wide Web began; The events and circumstances that led to the World Wide Web's current popularity; How HTML has grown from its conception in the early 1990s.

2000

A Look at the Web Development World Ahead by Charlie Morris. As we begin a new millennium, a new era in Web development is also beginning. Making predictions is dangerous in this business, but it seems clear that important changes in the way we use and design Web sites are underway. Web developers who want to stay in business had better take heed of these trends, and start boning up on the new technologies. Head for the woodshed today, or the unemployment office tomorrow!

1996

HTML 3.2 W3C's previous recommendation for HTML 3.2 represented the consensus on HTML features for 1996. HTML 3.2 added widely deployed features such as tables, applets and text flow around images, superscripts and subscripts while providing backwards compatibility with the existing

1995

HTML 2.0 Standard (RFC 1866) developed by the IETF's HTML working group, which closed in 1996. It set the standard for core HTML features based upon current practise in 1994. HTML 2.0 (November 1995) was developed under the aegis of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) to codify common practice in late 1994. HTML+ (1993) and HTML 3.0 (1995) proposed much richer versions of HTML. Despite never receiving consensus in standards discussions, these drafts led to the adoption of a range new features. The efforts of the World Wide Web Consortium's HTML working group to codify common practice in 1996 resulted in HTML 3.2 (January 1997, see [HTML32])."

1994

A Basic HTML Style Guide It was last updated on September 16, 1994 by me while still at NASA/GSFC. But if you'd like a peek into the early days of the web this is quaint.

1993

Design & Architecture of an Astrophysics Information System. A snapshot of the WWW as seen during the development of one of NASA's first web applications.

1992

Summary -- /WWW

"The WWW world consists of documents, and links. Indexes are special documents which, rather than being read, may be searched. The result of such a search is another ("virtual") document containing links to the documents found. A simple protocol (" HTTP ") is used to allow a browser program to request a keyword search by a remote information server."

1991

HTML Design Constraints. "It is required that HTML be a common language between all platforms. This implies no device-specific markup, or anything which requires control over fonts or colors, for example. This is in keeping with the SGML ideal."

1990

The original proposal of the WWW is a hand conversion to HTML of the original MacWord document written in March 1989 and later redistributed unchanged apart from the date added in May 1990. This document was an attempt to persuade CERN management that a global hypertext system was in CERN's interests.

Xanadu was a precursor to the WWW. See the Xanadu FAQ for details.

• Hobbes' internet timeline

• History of Hypertext and Hypermedia

• As We May Think by Vannevar Bush. This article was originally published in the July 1945 issue of The Atlantic Monthly.

Here's an executive summary of the World-Wide Web initiative dating from 1990 - 1991.