1990 to 1999: Expansion of the World Wide Web and the Rise of Dot-Coms - The Technical and Social History of Software Engineering - page 221

Emergence of the World Wide Web
The development of the internet itself was discussed in the previous chapter.
Recall that the internet is the network and network tools that allow computers and
other networks to communicate with each other. The World Wide Web is not the
same thing as the internet. The web is a collection of tools and services that uses
the internet but that focuses on sharing documents and information. A central tool
for the web is hypertext, which allows marked phrases in a document to lead users
to other pages and other websites.
In 1990, Tim Berners-Lee coined the term “World Wide Web.” He was very
influential in its development and created several enabling inventions, including
the famous hypertext markup language (HTML), the hypertext transfer protocol
(HTTP), the first web browser, and several other inventions. Probably every reader
of this topic uses the letters “HTTP” on a daily basis as an integral part of web
addresses. Not as many readers know that it is a fairly recent invention.
Because the web consists of millions of hypertext pages, the invention of
HTML ranks as a major human invention in communications. In a hypertext page,
selected phrases are “live” and navigate a computer to another page and another
website. Anyone who uses Wikipedia or other web documents will notice that the
live phrases are usually colored blue or underlined so that they stand out from the
normal black text.
When Tim Berners-Lee developed the first web browser, the computer he used
was a NeXT computer designed by Steve Jobs, which was discussed in the previ-
ous chapter.
The web browser is a critically important invention because it helped convert
the web into history's most important research tool. The history of browsers and
the so-called browser wars would make an interesting book—probably a thriller.
Tim Berners-Lee published a summary paper of the World Wide Web project
on August 6, 1991. This is usually considered to be the date of the birth of the
World Wide Web.
Senator Al Gore, later to become the Vice President, was the sponsor of an im-
portant bill called the High Performance Computing and Communications Act of
1991, which was also termed “the Gore bill.” This bill was passed and signed by
President George W. Bush. The Gore bill allotted $600,000 for the creation of a
National Research and Education Network .