THE LITTLE HISTORY OF THE WORLD WIDE WEB

Part A,Part B

Wolfgang Mulzer,Shunfeng Zhang


What is the World-Wide Web?


Hypertext is a way to organise documents so that your computer can help you find items of interest.

the blue rectangles are electronic documents, similar to pages of paper documents. Inside them, sensitive spots are indicated (the little red rectangles). A computer is used to display the pages on its screen. The sensitive spots are exploited by the computer to switch automatically from one page to another when the user clicks on a sensitive spot.

This navigation by wandering from one page to another is called "browsing". WWW is "seamless" in the sense that a user can see the whole Web of information as one vast hypertext document. There is no need to know where information is stored, or any details of its format or organisation. Behind this apparent simplicity of course there is a set of ingenious design concepts, protocols and conventions.

1. History of Hypertext

1.1 Memex

The history of hypertext begins in July of 1945, Dr. Vannevar Bush, proposes Memex in an article titled As We May Think published in The Atlantic Monthly. In the article, Bush outlines the ideas for a machine that would have the capacity to store textual and graphical information in such a way that any piece of information could be arbitrarily linked to any other piece.

1.2 Hypertext