Page 3 - e book 256_Neat

1. History of WWW (World Wide Web)

In the Beginning…

Ideas for the World Wide Web date back to as early as 1946 when Murray Leinster wrote a
short story which described how computers (that he referred to as 'Logics') lived in every
home, with each one having access to a central device where they could retrieve information.
Although the story does have several differences to the way the web works today, it does
capture the idea of a huge information network available to everyone in their homes.

The real vision and execution for the World Wide Web didn't come about until around 40
years later in 1980 when an English chap by the name of Tim Berners Lee was working on
a project known as 'Enquire'. Enquire was a simple database of people and software who
were working at the same place as Berners Lee. It was during this project that he
experimented with hypertext. Hypertext is text that can be displayed on devices which utilize
hyperlinks. The Berners Lee Enquire system used hyperlinks on each page of the database,
each page referencing other relevant pages within the system.

Tim Berners Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, at the London 2012 Olympic opening
ceremony. Berners Lee was a physicist and in his need to share information with other
physicists around the world found out that there was no quick and easy solution for doing
so. With this in mind, in 1989 he set about putting a proposal together for a centralized
database which contained links to other documents. This would have been the perfect
solution for Tim and his colleagues, but it turned out nobody was interested in it and nobody
took any notice - except for one person. Tim's boss liked his idea and encouraged him to
implement it in their next project. This new system was given a few different names such

2