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

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    “The whole history of civilisation is strewn with creeds and institutions which were invaluable at first, and deadly afterwards.”
    —Walter Bagehot (1826–1877)

    “To history therefore I must refer for answer, in which it would be an unhappy passage indeed, which should shew by what fatal indulgence of subordinate views and passions, a contest for an atom had defeated well founded prospects of giving liberty to half the globe.”
    —Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826)

    “And even my sense of identity was wrapped in a namelessness often hard to penetrate, as we have just seen I think. And so on for all the other things which made merry with my senses. Yes, even then, when already all was fading, waves and particles, there could be no things but nameless things, no names but thingless names. I say that now, but after all what do I know now about then, now when the icy words hail down upon me, the icy meanings, and the world dies too, foully named.”
    —Samuel Beckett (1906–1989)

    “He’ll go along o’er the wide world with me.”
    —William Shakespeare (1564–1616)

    “Our friendships hurry to short and poor conclusions, because we have made them a texture of wine and dreams, instead of the tough fibre of the human heart. The laws of friendship are austere and eternal, of one web with the laws of nature and of morals.”
    —Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)