ARTICLES
& REPORTS
Trends &
Knowledge
About
Innovation Network
- T r e n d s & K n o w l e d g e -
by Joyce Wycoff
There may be someone, somewhere who does not recognize the ubiquitous "www" that identifies the World Wide Web, but he or she is probably under 7 or over 90. The rest of us have experienced a major mindshift in the past three-four years as we began to recognize this growing web of information at our fingertips. A web we can contribute to as well as gather from.
The story of the Internet growing from a defense-industry communication network has been told frequently but the Web story, being a more recent phenomenon, is not quite as familiar. It is briefly told in the new book Webonomics, Nine Essential Principles for Growing Your Business on the World Wide Web by Evan I. Schwartz (Broadway Books, 1997 ... available from www.amazon.com, of course).
The Web concept traces back to Vannevar Bush, a vice-president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who published an article titled "As We May Think" in the Atlantic Monthly, in which he stated, "Instruments are at hand which, if properly developed, will give man access to and command over the inherited knowledge of the ages." Bush envisioned an easy-to-use, searchable, personal storehouse of knowledge which he called "the Memex."
While Bush was not able to build the Memex, he inspired others including Ted Nelson, who during his freshman year at Harvard, decided to create a "nonsequential writing system" which, in a paper presented in 1965, he called hypertext. But Nelson was not able to make his vision a reality and the baton was passed to Tim Berners-Lee, a young Oxford-trained physicist who proposed a global hypertext system he named the "WorldWideWeb." In December, 1990, he presented his software for creating, searching, and retrieving hypertext documents to his co-workers at the Switzerland-based European Particle Physics Laboratory (know by its French acronym CERN).
Berners-Lee invented three things: a HyperText Transfer Protocol (http) which allows computers to look up documents; the Uniform Resource Locator (URL) the addressing standard that allows documents to be found; and the HyperText Markup Language (HTML) that codes word processor documents to work in the hypertext environment. In the summer of 1991, Berners-Lee put his trio of programs on the Internet.
The next leap in the Web phenomenon came from a twenty-three year old programmer, Marc Andreessen who created the first user-friendly web browser called Mosaic and made it available free to anyone who wanted to download it over the Internet ... time January, 1993. By October of 1993, there were 500 computers hosting Web sites; by June of 1994, there were 1500; by the next year there were tens of thousands; then hundreds of thousands. Andreesseen, of course, was recruited by Jim Clark to build a better browser which became Netscape which made Wall Street history when it went public.
While the Web has become a highly commercial environment, it was originally driven by idealism. Berners-Lee discussed his hopes for the Web technology at the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Vannevar Bush's seminal paper. He commented, "We have access to information, but have we been solving problems? Well, there are many things it is much easier for individuals to do today than five years ago.
But personally, I don't feel that the Web has made great strides in helping us work as a global team. I still have a dream that the Web could be less of a television and more of an interactive sea of shared knowledge. I imagine it immersing us in a warm, friendly environment made of the things we and our friends have seen, heard, believe, or have figured out.
I would like it to bring our friends and colleagues closer, in that by working on this knowledge together, we can come to better understandings. If misunderstandings are the cause of many of the world's woes, then can we not work them in out in cyberspace?"