History of The World Wide Web

History Of The World Wide Web

The World Wide Web ("WWW" or simply the "Web") is a global information medium which users can read and write via computers connected to the Internet. The term is often mistakenly used as a synonym for the Internet itself, but the Web is a service that operates over the Internet, just as e-mail also does. The history of the Internet dates back significantly further than that of the World Wide Web.

The hypertext portion of the Web in particular has an intricate intellectual history; notable influences and precursors include Vannevar Bush's Memex, IBM's Generalized Markup Language, and Ted Nelson's Project Xanadu.

The concept of a home-based global information system goes at least as far back as "A Logic Named Joe", a 1946 short story by Murray Leinster, in which computer terminals, called "logics," were in every home. Although the computer system in the story is centralized, the story captures some of the feeling of the ubiquitous information explosion driven by the Web.

Read more about History Of The World Wide Web:  1979–1991: Development of The World Wide Web, 1992–1995: Growth of The WWW, 1996–1998: Commercialization of The WWW, 1999–2001: "Dot-com" Boom and Bust, 2002–present: The Web Becomes Ubiquitous

Famous quotes containing the words history of, history, world, wide and/or web:

    “Social history might be defined negatively as the history of a people with the politics left out.”
    —G.M. (George Macaulay)

    “Whenever we read the obscene stories, the voluptuous debaucheries, the cruel and torturous executions, the unrelenting vindictiveness, with which more than half the Bible is filled, it would be more consistent that we called it the word of a demon than the Word of God. It is a history of wickedness that has served to corrupt and brutalize mankind.”
    —Thomas Paine (1737–1809)

    “The science, the art, the jurisprudence, the chief political and social theories, of the modern world have grown out of Greece and Rome—not by favor of, but in the teeth of, the fundamental teachings of early Christianity, to which science, art, and any serious occupation with the things of this world were alike despicable.”
    —Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)

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    O minstrel galleons of Carib fire,
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    Is answered in the vortex of our grave
    The seal’s wide spindrift gaze toward paradise.”
    —Hart Crane (1899–1932)

    “For us necessity is not as of old an image without us, with whom we can do warfare; it is a magic web woven through and through us, like that magnetic system of which modern science speaks, penetrating us with a network subtler than our subtlest nerves, yet bearing in it the central forces of the world.”
    —Walter Pater (1839–1894)