First International Conference on the World-Wide Web

Last updated
First International Conference on the World-Wide Web
WWW1
World Wide Web Conference 1 (logo).gif
WWW1 logo
Host country Switzerland
DateMay 25, 1994 (1994-05-25)
May 27, 1994 (1994-05-27)
Venue(s)CERN
Cities Geneva
Participants
  • 380
  • Oscar Nierstrasz (Program chair) [1]
  • Bertrand Ibrahim (Conference chair) [1]
Website www.cern.ch/www94

Tim Berners-Lee drew what he called the "metro": a diagram of the relationships between the existing systems (FTP, SMTP, HTTP, ...) in the form of a stylised map resembling that of the London Underground. That made me think that we needed to deal with a lot more hard computer science than our small team of four or five could intellectually handle. Therefore I began to toy with the idea of an international conference on WWW technologies. Tim was not convinced, but I went ahead.

Contents

Robert Cailliau [2]

The First International Conference on the World-Wide Web (also known as WWW1) 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, [3] who were accepted out of 800 applicants. [4] It has been referred to as the "Woodstock of the Web". [5]

The event was organized by Robert Cailliau, [6] [7] a computer scientist who had helped to develop the original WWW specification, and was hosted by CERN. [8] Cailliau had lobbied inside CERN, and at conferences like the ACM Hypertext Conference in 1991 (in San Antonio) and 1993 (in Seattle). After returning from the Seattle conference, he announced the new World Wide Web Conference 1. [9] Coincidentally, the NCSA announced their Mosaic and the Web conference 23 hours later. [9]

Content

Dave Raggett showed his testbed web browser Arena and gave a summary of his first HTML+ Internet Draft. [10] He also submitted a paper for VRML. [3]

The Biological Sciences Division of the University of Chicago presented a web browser and HTML editor called Phoenix built upon tkWWW version 0.9. [11] [12] The editor extended the functionality of tkWWW. [11] [13]

Best of the Web Awards

The Best of the Web Awards were given out on May 26 following the "Best of WWW" contest set up by Brandon Plewe. The awards were selected via a two-month open nomination, and a two-week open voting period. A total of 5,225 votes were cast, with the winners averaging 100 votes. [14] [15]

Best of the Web '94 Recipients

Best Overall Site

Winner
  • National Center for Supercomputing Applications, U. Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
Honorable Mentions
  • World-Wide Web Home, European Center for Particle Physics (CERN)
  • CMU Computer Science Dept., Carnegie-Mellon U.
  • Global Network Navigator, O'Reilly and Associates
Other Nominees
  • SunSITE, U. North Carolina
  • United States Geological Survey

Best Campus-Wide Information Service

Winner
  • Globewide Network Academy
Honorable Mentions
  • Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute - RPINFO
  • St. Olaf College
  • University of Kansas - KUFacts
  • University of Texas - Austin
Other Nominees
  • Honolulu Community College
  • State University of New York at Buffalo
  • University of Maryland - Baltimore County
  • Wake Forest University - Deacons Online

Best Commercial Service

Winner
  • O'Reilly and Associates
Honorable Mention
  • Hewlett-Packard
  • Novell, Inc.
  • Sun Microsystems, Inc.
Other Nominees
  • Arctic Adventours, Inc.
  • Digital Equipment Corp.
  • The Mathworks Inc
  • Nine Lives Consignment Clothing Store
  • QMS
  • Quadralay
  • Santa Cruz Operation

Best Educational Service

Winner
  • Introduction to Object-Oriented Programming Using C++ - Marcus Speh
Honorable Mention
  • ArtServe - Australian National University
  • Expo - Frans van Hoesel (housed at UNC SunSITE)
  • Museum of Paleontology - University of California at Berkeley
  • Views of the Solar System - C.J. Hamilton, Los Alamos National Laboratory
Other Nominees
  • Early Scientific Instruments - Department of Physical Sciences, University of Naples "Federico II" [16]
  • Geographic Information Systems - U.S. Geological Survey
  • Geometry Applications Gallery - U. Minnesota Geometry Center
  • The Journey North - U. Michigan School of Education
  • A Tourist Expedition to Antarctica - L. Liming, U. Michigan

Best Entertainment Service

Winner
  • Sports Information Service, Eric Richard, MIT
Honorable Mention
  • Movie Database (Original in UK, or Mirror in US) - Rob Hartill, U. Wales-Cardiff
  • Doctor Fun - Dave Farley, U. Chicago
  • MTV - Adam Curry, MTV Networks
Other Nominees
  • The Global Network Navigator - O'Reilly and Associates
  • Music Database - Andy Burnett, U.S. Army CERL
  • TNS Technology Demonstrations - MIT Telemedia, Networks, and Systems Group
  • Wired Magazine

Best Professional Service

Winner
  • OncoLink, U. Pennsylvania
Honorable Mention
  • BioInformatics Server - Johns Hopkins U.
  • Explorer - U. Kansas UNITE Group
  • Unified CS Technical Report Index - Marc VanHeyningen, Indiana U.
  • Climate Data Catalog - Columbia U.
Other Nominees
  • Genome Data Base
  • HEASARC Browse - NASA Goddard Space Flight Center
  • SWISS-PROT Protein Sequence Database - Geneva U. Hospital
  • Physics E-Print Archives - Paul Ginsparg, Los Alamos National Laboratory
  • Virtual Hospital - U. Iowa

Best Navigational Aid

Winner
Honorable Mention
  • Internet Meta-Index - Oscar Nierstrasz, U. Geneva Informatics
  • Project DA-CLOD - Sam Sengupta, Washington U.-St. Louis
  • Galaxy - EINet
Other Nominees
  • AliWeb - Martijn Koster, Nexor
  • JumpStation - Jonathan Fletcher, Stirling U.
  • W3 Catalog - Oscar Nierstrasz, U. Geneva Informatics
  • Joel's Hierarchical Subject Index - Joel Jones, U. Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
  • Mother-of-all-BBS' - Oliver McBryan, U. Colorado CS
  • The Virtual Tourist - Brandon Plewe, SUNY/Buffalo

Most Important Service Concept

Winner
  • What's New on the WWW, Marc Andreessen, NCSA, June 1993
Honorable Mention
  • Web Magazines: The Global Network Navigator - O'Reilly and Associates
  • Distance Learning: The Globewide Network Academy
  • Virtual Museums: Honolulu C.C. Dinosaur Exhibit - Kevin Hughes
Other Nominees
  • Interactive Graphics: Honolulu C.C. Campus Map - Kevin Hughes
  • Web Space for Rent: Internex Information Services
  • Online Encyclopedia: The Interpedia
  • File converters, Text Databases: Usenet FAQ Archives - Tom Fine, Ohio State U.
  • Customized Server Software: Map Server - Steve Putz, Xerox PARC

Best Document Design

Winner
  • Travels With Samantha, Phillip Greenspun, MIT
Honorable Mention
Other Nominees
  • Ada 9X Reference Manual - Magnus Kempe, Swiss Federal Inst. Tech.- Lausanne
  • GNN NetNews - O'Reilly and Associates
  • HTML Style Guide - Tim Berners-Lee, CERN
  • Manual of Federal Geographic Data Products - William G. Miller, U.S. Geological Survey
  • Perl Manual - Robert Stockton, Carnegie-Mellon U.
  • U.S. Constitution - Legal Information Institute, Cornell U.

Best Use of Interaction

Winner
  • Xerox Map Server, Steve Putz, Xerox PARC
Honorable Mention
  • DA-CLOD - Sam Sengupta, Washington U.-St. Louis
  • Geometry Applications Gallery - U. Minnesota Geometry Center
  • Weather Map requestor - Charles Henrich, Michigan State U.
Other Nominees
  • 16 Puzzle - Andrew Wilson, U. Cardiff-Wales
  • Swiss 2D-Page - Geneva U. Hospital ExPASy
  • SkyView Gateway - NASA Goddard Space Flight Center HEASARC
  • You Are Here Server - Brandon Plewe, SUNY/Buffalo

Best Use of Multiple Media

Winner
  • Le Louvre, Nicolas Pioch, Telecom Paris
Honorable Mention
  • ArtServe - Australian National University
  • Coherent Structure in Turbulent Fluid Flow - Nat. Ctr for Atmospheric Research
  • Expo - Frans van Hoesel
  • TNS Technology Demos - MIT Telemedia Networks and Systems Group
Other Nominees
  • Een Kwestie van Kiezen (A Matter of Choice) - U. Wageningen, Netherlands
  • Museum of Paleontology - U. California - Berkeley
  • Recording Studio - Adam Curry, MTV
  • Texas History Exhibits - U. Texas-Austin Library
  • Usenet Image Gallery - Stéphane Bortzmeyer, CNAM, France
  • XMorphia - Roy Williams, Caltech

Most Technical Merit

Winner
  • Map Server, Steve Putz, Xerox PARC
Honorable Mention
  • Dutch Teletext Gateway - Arjan de Vet, Eindhoven University
  • Gallery of Interactive On-Line Geometry - UMN Geometry Center
  • Interactive Genetic Art - Scott Reilly and Michael Witbrock, Carnegie-Mellon U.
Other Nominees
  • Mother-of-all-BBS' - Oliver McBryan, U. Colorado CS
  • Monthly Temperature Anomalies - NOAA National Climatic Data Center
  • Temperature Display - Oliver McBryan, U. Colorado CS
  • GRN UseNet Article Decoder - George Phillips, U. British Columbia
  • Say... - Axel Belinfante, U. Twente, Netherlands
  • SkyView - NASA Goddard Space Flight Center

World Wide Web Hall of Fame Inductees

The following people were inducted into the World Wide Web Hall of Fame for their contributions and influence. [17] The inductees received a Chromachron watch, engraved with the WWW logo. [14]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Tim Berners-Lee</span> English computer scientist, inventor of the World Wide Web (born 1955)

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).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">World Wide Web</span> Linked hypertext system on the Internet

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).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mosaic (web browser)</span> Early web browser (1993–1997)

NCSA Mosaic is a discontinued web browser, and one of the first to be widely available. It was instrumental in popularizing the World Wide Web and the general Internet by integrating multimedia such as text and graphics. It was named for its support of multiple Internet protocols, such as Hypertext Transfer Protocol, File Transfer Protocol, Network News Transfer Protocol, and Gopher. Its intuitive interface, reliability, personal computer support, and simple installation all contributed to its popularity within the web. Mosaic is the first browser to display images inline with text instead of in a separate window. It is often described as the first graphical web browser, though it was preceded by WorldWideWeb, the lesser-known Erwise, and ViolaWWW.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">WorldWideWeb</span> First web browser, later renamed Nexus

WorldWideWeb is the first web browser and web page editor. It was discontinued in 1994. It was the first WYSIWYG HTML editor.

NCSA HTTPd is an early, now discontinued, web server originally developed at the NCSA at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign by Robert McCool and others. First released in 1993, it was among the earliest web servers developed, following Tim Berners-Lee's CERN httpd, Tony Sanders' Plexus server, and some others. It was for some time the natural counterpart to the Mosaic web browser in the client–server World Wide Web. It also introduced the Common Gateway Interface, allowing for the creation of dynamic websites.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">ViolaWWW</span> Popular web browser in the early 1990s

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.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Robert Cailliau</span> Belgian engineer, computer scientist, and co-inventor of the World Wide Web

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.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Line Mode Browser</span> Command-line web browser

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.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Libwww</span>

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."

<span class="mw-page-title-main">History of the World Wide Web</span> Information system running in the Internet

The World Wide Web is a global information medium that 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.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">The Web Conference</span>

The ACM Web Conference is a yearly international academic conference on the topic of the future direction of the World Wide Web. The first conference of many was held and organized by Robert Cailliau in 1994 at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland. The conference has been organized by the International World Wide Web Conference Committee (IW3C2), also founded by Robert Cailliau and colleague Joseph Hardin, every year since. In 2020, the Web Conference series became affiliated with the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), where it is supported by ACM SIGWEB. The conference's location rotates among North America, Europe, and Asia and its events usually span a period of five days. The conference aims to provide a forum in which "key influencers, decision makers, technologists, businesses and standards bodies" can both present their ongoing work, research, and opinions as well as receive feedback from some of the most knowledgeable people in the field.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">MacWWW</span>

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

A web browser is a software application for retrieving, presenting and traversing information resources on the World Wide Web. It further provides for the capture or input of information which may be returned to the presenting system, then stored or processed as necessary. The method of accessing a particular page or content is achieved by entering its address, known as a Uniform Resource Identifier or URI. This may be a web page, image, video, or other piece of content. Hyperlinks present in resources enable users easily to navigate their browsers to related resources. A web browser can also be defined as an application software or program designed to enable users to access, retrieve and view documents and other resources on the Internet.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">CERN httpd</span> Early web server

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.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Dave Raggett</span> English computer specialist

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.

ENQUIRE was a software project written in 1980 by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN, which was the predecessor to the World Wide Web. It was a simple hypertext program that had some of the same ideas as the Web and the Semantic Web but was different in several important ways.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">François Flückiger</span> Computer scientist

François Flückiger is a French computer scientist who worked at CERN. He was selected for induction in 2013 in the Internet Hall of Fame.

Jean-François Groff is a telecommunication engineer, and one of the key figures in the early development of the World Wide Web at CERN. He worked in close collaboration with Tim Berners-Lee, and helped define the HTTP protocol and HTML language. Groff is also the CTO and founder of Studio KOH, and CEO of Mobino, a mobile payments company headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland.

References

  1. 1 2 "Thanks to People". CERN. 28 May 1994. Retrieved 16 May 2010.
  2. n:Wikinews:Story preparation/Interview with Robert Cailliau
  3. 1 2 "First International Conference on the World-Wide Web". CERN. 2 June 1994. Retrieved 16 May 2010.
  4. Robert Cailliau (1995). "A Little History of the World Wide Web". World Wide Web Conference . Retrieved 25 July 2010.
  5. "How the web began". CERN. 2008. Retrieved 25 July 2010.
  6. Robert Cailliau (21 July 2010). "A Short History of the Web". NetValley . Retrieved 21 July 2010.
  7. Tim Berners-Lee. "Frequently asked questions - Robert Cailliau's role". World Wide Web Consortium . Retrieved 22 July 2010.
  8. "IW3C2 - Past and Future Conferences". International World Wide Web Conferences Steering Committee. 2010-05-02. Archived from the original on 2010-06-25. Retrieved 16 May 2010.
  9. 1 2 Petrie, Charles; Cailliau, Robert (November 1997). "Interview Robert Cailliau on the WWW Proposal: "How It Really Happened."". Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. Archived from the original on 6 January 2011. Retrieved 18 August 2010.
  10. Raggett, Dave. "Dave Raggett's Bio". World Wide Web Consortium . Retrieved 11 June 2010.
  11. 1 2 Marc G. Lavenant; John A. Kruper (25–27 May 1994). "The Phoenix Project: Distributed Hypermedia Authoring" (PostScript). World Wide Web Conference 1. University of Chicago: CERN. Archived from the original on November 20, 2017. Retrieved 19 November 2010.
  12. Virden, Larry W. (26 July 2006). "comp.lang.tcl Frequently Asked Questions (July 26, 2006) (4/6)". SourceForge. Archived from the original on 4 April 2011. Retrieved 16 November 2010.
  13. README of Phoenix-0.1.8 Alpha release (released 15 May 1995); available here
  14. 1 2 "Awards". CERN. 28 May 1994. Retrieved 16 May 2010.
  15. "The Best of the Web '94". Best of the Web Directory . Best of the Web. 1994. Retrieved 16 May 2010.
  16. Reported in the BoWeb '94 web site as "Naples Institute of Physics"
  17. "BoWeb 94 - WWW Hall of Fame". Best of the Web Directory . Best of the Web. Archived from the original on 1999-02-24. Retrieved 16 May 2010.