December 1st, 2004
Happy Birthday WWW (and the W3C)!
The World Wide Web Consortium (the W3C) is holding a single-day conference in Boston today in celebration of its 10-year anniversary. The Web itself, according to W3C spokesperson Janet Daly, is 16 years old. The main conference room (a ballroom at the Fairmont Copley Plaza) is packed with the key movers and shakers responsible for not just the birth of the Web, but also the formation of the W3C. So far, the most moving passages have come from W3C director and Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee, who described how the Web’s roots can be traced back to 1945 when Vannevar Bush penned the essay "As We May Think" in The Atlantic Monthly. The essay by Bush, who is considered a pioneer of hypertext, is about a photoelectrical mechanical device called a "memex" (aka: memory extension) that could make and follow links between documents on microfiche.
Berners-Lee went on to describe the first working hypertext system, which was invented in 1960 on a mainframe by Douglas Engelbart – who was inspired by Bush’s essay. The problem, according to Berners-Lee, was that it still only worked on one system. From there, Berners-Lee recounted how the Internet was born out of the ARPANET, how Paul Mockapetris invented the Domain Name System, and how he developed the first prototype of the Web in 1990 using two NEXT computers that CERN, where he worked, had purchased for evaluation. One of the Web’s most pivotal moments came when the University of Minnesota announced that it would charge royalties for the usage of a similar Internet-based document system invented there and known as Gopher. At that moment, everybody (industry, universities, etc.) that had been using Gopher dropped it like a hot potato and went to Berners-Lee to find out what the business terms for using the World Wide Web protocols would be. In April of 1993, CERN released a stamped document that the Web would be royalty-free. Needless to say,the rest is history. The relegation of Gopher to a has-been technology, the growth of the Web since then, and the innovation it has spawned, is a real-world testimony to why core infrastructure protocols should be unencumbered by royalties or licensing restrictions.
