Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
for IBM PCs. Consumers eagerly bought 10 million copies of Windows, giving Microsoft
a near monopoly in the graphical user interface market that it has maintained ever since.
In 1982 Peter Brown at the University of Kent at Canterbury started a hypertext research
project. He named the software Guide. Later, Office Workstations Ltd. commercialized
Guide, releasing versions for both the Apple Macintosh and the IBM PC.
In 1987 Apple Computer released HyperCard, a hypertext system that enabled
programmers to create “stacks” of “cards.” A card could contain text and images. The
HyperCard programmer created links from one card to another with “buttons.” Buttons
could be visible to the user and labeled, or they could be transparent and associated with
an image or an area of the card.
Users typically viewed one card at a time. They jumped from one card to another by
using the computer's mouse to move a cursor over a button and then clicking the mouse.
The best-selling computer games Myst and Riven were actually HyperCard stacks.
Tim Berners-Lee is the son of two mathematicians, both of whom were programmers
for the Ferranti Mark 1 computer in the 1950s. From them, Berners-Lee learned that,
“in principle, a person could program a computer to do most anything” [46, p. 3]. He
also learned that it is easy to get a computer to keep information in lists or tables, but
much more difficult to get it to remember arbitrary relationships.
When Berners-Lee was in high school, his father read some topics about the brain;
the two of them talked about how a computer might be able to make neural-like connec-
tions the way a brain does. This idea stuck with Berners-Lee, and in 1980, while working
for CERN in Switzerland, he wrote a program called Enquire that incorporated links be-
tween information. Berners-Lee was not familiar with the work of Vannevar Bush, Ted
Nelson, or Doug Engelbart, but he was heading in the same direction.
In late 1989 Berners-Lee wrote a memo to a management team at CERN, proposing
the development of a networked hypertext system that could be used for documentation
purposes. When they didn't respond, he tried again in the spring of 1990. Again, no
response. However, an intriguing new personal computer called the NeXT had just
been released. Berners-Lee asked his boss if he could purchase a NeXT to check out its
operating system and programming environment. His boss okayed the purchase, then
puckishly suggested that maybe Berners-Lee ought to test the system's capabilities by
implementing his proposed hypertext system on it [46].
Unlike earlier commercial hypertext systems, Berners-Lee's system allowed links
between information stored on different computers connected by a network. Because
it is built on top of the TCP/IP protocol, links can connect any two computers on the
Internet, even if they have different hardware or are running different operating systems.
A
We b b rows e r
is a program that allows a user to view Web pages and traverse
hyperlinks between pages. Berners-Lee completed the first Web browser on the NeXT
