See also
- Gopher (protocol) - another hypertext protocol
- History of the Internet
- History of the World Wide Web
- NLS (computer system)
- Project Xanadu
| Inventor | Tim Berners-Lee |
|---|---|
| Inception | 1980 [1] |
| Manufacturer | CERN |
ENQUIRE was a software project written in 1980 by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN, [2] which was the predecessor to the World Wide Web. [2] [3] [4] It was a simple hypertext program [4] that had some of the same ideas as the Web and the Semantic Web but was different in several important ways.
According to Berners-Lee, the name was inspired by the title of an old how-to book, Enquire Within upon Everything . [2] [3] [5]
Around 1980, approximately 10,000 people were working at CERN with different hardware, software and individual requirements. Much work was done by email and file exchange. [4] The scientists needed to keep track of different things [3] and different projects became involved with each other. [2] Berners-Lee started to work for 6 months on 23 June 1980 at CERN while he developed ENQUIRE. [6] The requirements for setting up a new system were compatibility with different networks, disk formats, data formats, and character encoding schemes, which made any attempt to transfer information between dissimilar systems a daunting and generally impractical task. [7] The different hypertext-systems before ENQUIRE were not passing these requirements i.e. Memex and NLS. [7]
ENQUIRE had pages called cards and hyperlinks within the cards. The links had different meanings and about a dozen relationships which were displayed to the creator, things, documents and groups described by the card. The relationship between the links could be seen by everybody explaining what the need of the link was or what happen if a card was removed. [4] Everybody was allowed to add new cards but they always needed an existing card. [6]
| Relationship | Inverse Relationship |
|---|---|
| made | was made by |
| includes | is part of |
| uses | is used by |
| describes | is described by |
ENQUIRE was closer to a modern wiki than to a web site:
The World Wide Web was created to unify the different existing systems at CERN like ENQUIRE, the CERNDOC, VMS Notes and the USENET. [1]
Berners-Lee came back to CERN in 1984 and intensively used his own system. [1] [4] He realized that most of the time coordinating the project was to keep information up to date. [4] He recognized that a system similar to ENQUIRE was needed, "but accessible to everybody." [4] There was a need that people be able to create cards independently of others and to link to other cards without updating the linked card. This idea is the big difference and the cornerstone to the World Wide Web. [4] Berners-Lee didn't make ENQUIRE suitable for other persons to use the system successfully, and in other CERN divisions there were similar situations to the division he was in. [1] Another problem was that external links, for example to existing databases, weren't allowed, and that the system wasn't powerful enough to handle enough connections to the database. [1] [2]
Further development stopped because Berners-Lee gave the ENQUIRE disc to Robert Cailliau, who had been working under Brian Carpenter before he left CERN. Carpenter suspects that the disc was reused for other purposes since nobody was later available to do further work on ENQUIRE. [9]
The application ran on terminal with plaintext 24x80. [4] The first version was able to hyperlink between files. [2] ENQUIRE was written in the Pascal programming language and implemented on a Norsk Data NORD-10 under SINTRAN III, [2] [4] [6] [8] [9] and version 2 was later ported to MS-DOS and to VAX/VMS. [2] [4]
HyperText Markup Language or HTML is the standard markup language for documents designed to be displayed in a web browser. It defines the content and structure of web content. It is often assisted by technologies such as Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and scripting languages such as JavaScript.
Hypertext is text displayed on a computer display or other electronic devices with references (hyperlinks) to other text that the reader can immediately access. Hypertext documents are interconnected by hyperlinks, which are typically activated by a mouse click, keypress set, or screen touch. Apart from text, the term "hypertext" is also sometimes used to describe tables, images, and other presentational content formats with integrated hyperlinks. Hypertext is one of the key underlying concepts of the World Wide Web, where Web pages are often written in the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML). As implemented on the Web, hypertext enables the easy-to-use publication of information over the Internet.
Sir Timothy John Berners-Lee, also known as TimBL, is an English computer scientist best known as the inventor of the World Wide Web, the HTML markup language, the URL system, and HTTP. He is a professorial research fellow at the University of Oxford and a professor emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
The World Wide Web is an information system that enables content sharing over the Internet through user-friendly ways meant to appeal to users beyond IT specialists and hobbyists. It allows documents and other web resources to be accessed over the Internet according to specific rules of the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP).
WorldWideWeb is the first web browser and web page editor. It was discontinued in 1994. It was the first WYSIWYG HTML editor.
This article presents a timeline of hypertext technology, including "hypermedia" and related human–computer interaction projects and developments from 1945 on. The term hypertext is credited to the author and philosopher Ted Nelson.
ViolaWWW is a discontinued web browser, the first to support scripting and stylesheets for the World Wide Web (WWW). It was first released in 1991/1992 for Unix and acted as the recommended browser at CERN, where the WWW was invented, but eventually lost its position as most frequently used browser to Mosaic.
Robert Cailliau is a Belgian informatics engineer who proposed the first (pre-www) hypertext system for CERN in 1987 and collaborated with Tim Berners-Lee on the World Wide Web from before it got its name. He designed the historical logo of the WWW, organized the first International World Wide Web Conference at CERN in 1994 and helped transfer Web development from CERN to the global Web consortium in 1995. He is listed as co-author of How the Web Was Born by James Gillies, the first book-length account of the origins of the World Wide Web.
The Line Mode Browser is the second web browser ever created. The browser was the first demonstrated to be portable to several different operating systems. Operated from a simple command-line interface, it could be widely used on many computers and computer terminals throughout the Internet. The browser was developed starting in 1990, and then supported by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) as an example and test application for the libwww library.
Libwww is an early World Wide Web software library providing core functions for web browsers, implementing HTML, HTTP, and other technologies. Tim Berners-Lee, at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), released libwww in late 1992, comprising reusable code from the first browsers.
Nicola Pellow is an English mathematician and information scientist who was one of the nineteen members of the WWW Project at CERN working with Tim Berners-Lee. She joined the project in November 1990, while an undergraduate maths student enrolled on a sandwich course at Leicester Polytechnic. Pellow recalled having little experience with programming languages, "... apart from using a bit of Pascal and FORTRAN as part of my degree course."
Dan Connolly is an American computer scientist who was closely involved with the creation of the World Wide Web as a member of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).
The World Wide Web is a global information medium which users can access via computers connected to the Internet. The term is often mistakenly used as a synonym for the Internet, but the Web is a service that operates over the Internet, just as email and Usenet do. The history of the Internet and the history of hypertext date back significantly further than that of the World Wide Web.
Erwise is an early discontinued web browser, and the first that was available for the X Window System.
MacWWW, also known as Samba, is an early minimalist web browser from 1992 meant to run on Macintosh computers. It was the first web browser for the classic Mac OS platform, and the first for any non-Unix operating system. MacWWW tries to emulate the design of WorldWideWeb. Unlike modern browsers it opens each link in a new window only after a double-click. It was a commercial product from CERN and cost 50 European Currency Units
CERN httpd is an early, now discontinued, web server (HTTP) daemon originally developed at CERN from 1990 onwards by Tim Berners-Lee, Ari Luotonen and Henrik Frystyk Nielsen. Implemented in C, it was the first web server software.
The First International Conference on the World-Wide Web was the first-ever conference about the World Wide Web, and the first meeting of what became the International World Wide Web Conference. It was held on May 25 to 27, 1994 in Geneva, Switzerland. The conference had 380 participants, who were accepted out of 800 applicants. It has been referred to as the "Woodstock of the Web".
Dave Raggett is an English computer specialist who has played a major role in implementing the World Wide Web since 1992. He has been a W3C Fellow at the World Wide Web Consortium since 1995 and worked on many of the key web protocols, including HTTP, HTML, XHTML, MathML, XForms, and VoiceXML. Raggett also wrote HTML Tidy and is currently pioneering W3C's work on the Web of Things. He lives in the west of England.
Hypertext is text displayed on a computer or other electronic device with references (hyperlinks) to other text that the reader can immediately access, usually by a mouse click or keypress sequence. Early conceptions of hypertext defined it as text that could be connected by a linking system to a range of other documents that were stored outside that text. In 1934 Belgian bibliographer, Paul Otlet, developed a blueprint for links that telescoped out from hypertext electrically to allow readers to access documents, books, photographs, and so on, stored anywhere in the world.
SGMLguid, also known as "CERN SGML", "Waterloo based SGML", and "Waterloo SGML", was an early SGML application developed and used at CERN between 1986 and 1990. It served as a model of the earliest HTML specifications.