Nature of web; Who invented the web

[Albert Lunde]

At 2:16 PM -0500 4/9/97, Joe Schallan wrote:
>Who invented the web?
>
>I'm aware that Theodore Nelson is widely credited with being
>the "inventor" of hypertext.  Something very much like the web is
>pretty well fleshed out in his Xanadu Project proposal, discussed
>in his early-70s book, "Computer Lib / Dream Machines."
>
>And I've always heard CERN credited with the invention of
>the hypertext-transport protocol and the adoption of SGML-
>based tagging. [...]
>Surely someone before Ted Nelson had the idea of
>dynamically linking documents in a real-time context.
>Was there a Vannevar Bush of hypertext?   Likewise,
>certainly someone besides CERN was working on the
>idea of hypertext delivered via the Arpanet.  This idea
>must have been knocking around for years.

I think you should distingushed between "Who invented networked hypertext?"
and "Who invented the Web".

The combination of HTTP plus HTML plus URLs has a clear line of parentage
to the usual suspects at CERN with subsequent involvement by a number of
parties. (People at NCSA and other educational/research sites made
important contributions.)

This has several characteristics:
- Hypertext with SGML-like markup
- Links to servers anywhere on the Internet
- Unified addressing secment for common Internet services

(The WWW has also subsequently borrowed ideas from MIME and other Internet
Standards.)

There were various projects either previously or in developed parallel that
exhibited some of these elements, but none that is the _direct_ ancestor of
"the web" as far as I know.

U of Minn Gopher and the CWIS system at MIT come to mind as examples that
were out there at nearly the same time.  But they are NOT "the web", they
just have some common characteristics.



---
    Albert Lunde                      Albert-Lunde at nwu.edu