Information Technology Reference
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Public (anonymous) FTP servers were a first step in this direction. Yet finding
and, particularly, referencing information still required human interaction to
a large extent. However, starting in the late 1980s and early 1990s, several
parallel developments changed this situation. The need for directory services
and user-friendly search facilities of the information available on the Internet
was recognized and taken into account by what we can - in a sloppy way -
call the first “net browser”: Gopher
2
was the first program that allowed the
user to browse and search for data and computational resources and tried
to abstract away from cryptic commands, hiding network details completely
from the user.
Along with the first menu-driven graphical user interfaces and operating
systems, Gopher, introduced in 1991 at the University of Minnesota, provided
browsing facilities through hierarchies of application links, files, directories, a
phone book server (X.500), graphics, etc. on a remote machine, plus facilities
to search indexing servers. Fig. 2.1 shows an “ancient” Gopher browser.
Fig. 2.1.
Gopher - the first “net browser”
However, in order for the idea to really take off, another revolutionary
idea - or, more precisely, the combination of existing revolutionary ideas -
was necessary, and it took some two more years until what we refer to as
the “Web” and a “Web browser” were fully developed. The whole idea of the
Web dates back to a small application called Enquire. Tim Berners-Lee, then
a young researcher at CERN, first developed Enquire, an e
cient, easy-to-use
information system, mainly for his own use. Enquire
3
already used terms
such as “universal document identifier” and “hypertext”.
2
http://gopherproject.org/Software/Gopher
.
3
Inspired by the title of a topic with the flowery title
Enquire about everything
.
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