Weaving the World Wide Web - The Computing Universe: A Journey through a Revolution - page 224

Fig. 11.4. Bricks-and-mortar librar-
ies were the traditional way of doing
research before the advent of the World
Wide Web. This photograph shows the
famous Reading Room at the British
Library in London. People wanting to use
it had to apply in writing for a read-
er's pass, which would be issued by the
Principal Librarian.

In June 1992, in an issue of the University of Minnesota Wilson Library Bulletin , librar-
ian Jean Armour Polly wrote an article titled “Surfing the Internet.” In the article,
she described how she could, from her home in New York, “surf” from server to
server looking for information across the world:

Today I'll travel to Minnesota, Texas, California, Cleveland, New Zealand,
Sweden, and England. I'm not frantically packing, and I won't pick up any
frequent flyer mileage. In fact, I'm sipping cocoa at my Macintosh. My trips
will be electronic, using the computer on my desk, communications software,
a modem, and a standard phone line. 8

Polly got the idea for the metaphor from a picture of an “information surfer”
on her Apple Macintosh mouse pad. At the time, “surfing the Internet” was a
very labor-intensive process. It meant explicitly downloading files from remote
servers using the file transfer protocol (FTP). What finally made information surf-
ing easy was the combination of two developments. One was the World Wide
Web developed by Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau at CERN, the high-
energy physics research laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland. The other was the
easy-to-use Mosaic browser, the first web browser to gain popularity among
the general public. Mosaic was created by Marc Andreessen, then still a stu-
dent, and Eric Bina, a staff member at the National Center for Supercomputing
Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois. The Mosaic browser included
features such as icons (tiny pictures), bookmarks to store locations users might
want to revisit, and a simple point-and-click method for finding, viewing, and
downloading information that was appealing to people with little knowledge
of computers.
Librarians were among the first people to see the impact of the Internet on
how we access knowledge. Until recently, bricks-and-mortar libraries served as
the temples of knowledge ( Fig. 11.4 ), but with the arrival of the Internet and
the web this has changed. We can now literally have all the topics and all the
information in all major libraries in the world at our fingertips. The invention
of the World Wide Web and the technologies used to search it are the subject
of this chapter.

B.11.3. Tim Berners-Lee graduated
from Queen's College, Oxford in 1976
with a degree in physics. In 1980, at
the CERN Laboratory near Geneva,
Switzerland, he started to work on
ideas for a novel “web” of information.
His work was motivated by the need to
develop a system that would provide
fast access to manuals describing
complex equipment, experiments, and
other documentation used at CERN.
Berners-Lee's great contribution was
to devise an engineering solution for
combining the Internet and hypertext
links into a powerful tool. Time maga-
zine named him as one of the twenty
most influential persons of the twenti-
eth century and in 2003 he received a
knighthood from the Queen.

Error 404 and the World Wide Web

In 1980, Tim Berners-Lee ( B.11.3 ), a young physicist turned software engi-
neer, accepted a temporary software consulting position at CERN, the famous
European laboratory for particle physics near Geneva, Switzerland ( Fig. 11.5 ).