Re: A WWW history question

Daniel W. Connolly (connolly@hal.com)
Fri, 4 Nov 1994 18:17:38 +0100

In message <9411041150.AA12962@flame.falch.no>, Steinar Bang writes:
>Here's a history questions for the old-timers:
>
>Would it be correct to say that the earliest idea of the WWW was to
>offer a single consistent user interface to different network
>services, rather than a world wide hypertext system?

I gather that TimBL believed that hypertext _is_ an single consistent
user interface to different network services:

---
From: WorldWideWeb: Proposal for a HyperText Project
at: http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/Proposal.html


WorldWideWeb:


Proposal for a HyperText Project 
T. Berners-Lee / CN, R. Cailliau / ECP 


Abstract:


HyperText is a way to link and access information of various kinds as a web of
nodes in which the user can browse at will. Potentially, HyperText provides a
single user-interface to many large classes of stored information such as
reports, notes, data-bases, computer documentation and on-line systems help. We
propose the implementation of a simple scheme to incorporate several different
servers of machine-stored information already available at CERN, including an
analysis of the requirements for information access needs by experiments. 

---


see also: "WWW Project History"
at http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/History.html


The WWW project is _very_ well documented on info.cern.ch. It's fairly ironic
that most WWW users get their info from NCSA's whats-new and FAQ documents,
and never get the background info from info.cern.ch. They end up asking
historical and architectural questions on www-talk or comp.infosystems....
that would be easily answered with 5 minutes surfing around info.cern.ch.


Oh... and do dispell a popular myth: the CERN LineMode browser is
_not_ the original WWW client. The original WWW client was a WYWIWYG
HTML editor and multi-window browser that TimBL wrote for the
NeXTStep environment. I thought it was kinda funny when somebody asked
on comp.infosystems.www.* "Is there a WWW client for the NeXT?"




Dan