A brief history of the early web
Before we can discuss the World Wide Web, we need to know the difference between the internet and the World Wide Web. The Internet is a global network of interconnected networks. It is essentially a network of millions of private, public, academic, business, and government networks. A network consists of multiple interconnected devices which can communicate with each other. These devices can be computers, servers, mobile phones or even modern household devices. Where as the World Wide Web is a vast system of interconnected documents and resources, such as web pages, videos, and other files, that are accessible through the internet via unique Uniform Resource Locators or URLs. So, the Internet is the global network that works as the infrastructure on which the World Wide Web works. The Web(WWW) can’t be accessed without the internet.
Before Internet Service Providers(ISPs) brought the Internet into the homes of billions around the world, early versions of the internet were only available via public access points in institutions, universities, and government agencies. This limited the number of people who could access the Internet, when they could, and what they could access. The Internet at the time was a rather exclusive domain. Then in the 1980s, online service providers such as CompuServe, Prodigy, and America Online (AOL) began to offer limited capabilities to access the Internet, such as e-mail and instant messaging (IM), but they were far more limited. For example, unless you were an e-mail expert, you could only write to people on the same service: the same was true of IM. One of the first online services, CompuServe, connected the world before the World Wide Web. It’s subscribers had access to email, online newspapers and magazines and the ability to share and download files.
In 1989, the first Internet service providers, companies offering the public direct access to the Internet for a monthly fee, were established. In Brookline, Massachusetts, The World became the first commercial ISP in the US. Its first customer was served in November 1989. The World Wide Web was first conceived by Tim Berners-Lee on March 12, 1989. In order to access the web people needed software that could read and display web documents: they needed a web browser. Tim Berners-Lee releases the first ever web browser on Christmas day 1990. His graphical browser had many good features like full color and multiple windows; however, it was only available on NeXT machines. In 1993 the University of Illinois made widely available Mosaic version 1.0, developed by Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina. Mosaic was a web browser that ran on most types of computers, and it featured inline multimedia, an easy to use GUI, and visual elements for web designers. Soon after launch, Mosaic would become the most popular browser on the market. In 1994 Netscape Communications Corporation (originally called Mosaic Communications Corporation) was formed to further develop the Mosaic browser for commercial use. Shortly thereafter, the software giant Microsoft Corporation became interested in supporting Internet applications on personal computers (PCs) and developed its Internet Explorer Web browser (based initially on Mosaic). These new commercial capabilities accelerated the growth of the Internet, which as early as 1988 had already been growing at the rate of 100 percent per year.
Apr 30, 1993 at the urging of Berners-Lee and his team, CERN officially enters the World Wide Web into the public domain, making it freely available to anyone. It is perhaps the single most impactful decision made on behalf of the web, and enabled an entire generation of programmers to extend it, build with it, and spread it. The WWW immediately begins to grow; making it difficult to navigate. Jun 14, 1993 NCSA, the company behind Mosaic, later Netscape Navigator, later Mozilla Firefox, creates “What’s New”, a webpage that highlights the most popular new sites updated every weekday. The page was added to the Mosaic browser homepage. Since their browser was extremely popular in the early days of the web, the “What’s New” page had a lot viewers, and site owners were motivated to send them links to put up.
Aug 19, 1993 Global Network Navigator was launched. GNN was an interactive guide to the web that contained news stories and links to popular sites. It was updated regularly and would later become the first site to experiment with advertising. GNN was the first commercial website, and its early entry to the web would make it the first to do many things (first to add graphic design elements to their website, first site with a sponsored link, the first mainstream web portal). GNN existed somewhere between a portal and a magazine, offering its visitors a categorized directory of useful websites alongside original editorial content tailored to a web audience. GNN was a massively successful, becoming one of the early web’s most popular destination.
Early search engines relied on manually curated list. Matthew Gray brought crawling to the web, where search engines traverse a large part of the web automatically by scraping its content one by one. This indexed information is then paired to a text based search. Soon this became the dominant method of search. Jerry Yang and David Filo create their online directory, Jerry and David’s guide to the World Wide Web, in just a few weeks while working on their electrical engineering degrees at Stanford. The site immediately garnered attention as the place for discovering new sites, organized into neat and tidy, but somewhat strange, categories. A few months later, the site would be renamed to simply Yahoo!. Apr 20, 1994 WebCrawler, developed by University of Washington computer science student Brian Pinkerton, was among the first search engines, and the first to offer full text search of page content. Within six months, it would serve over a million queries.
Sep 29 1994 The domain name for Tripod is registered, pre-dating most other free web hosting services like Geocities and Angelfire. Tripod’s explicit goal is to give college students a way of setting up a spot for themselves on the web, though it would eventually come to be known as an easy-to-use service for free web homepages. Nov 01, 1994 David Bohnett and John Rezner create a web hosting service called Beverly Hills Internet. After giving away a fixed amount of web storage for free, they change the name to Geocities and create a number of “neighborhoods” for amateur webmasters to connect through. Yahoo would later acquire Geocities in 1999, and take it offline in 2009.
