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T171 - TMA
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Open University Courses offer basic computer skills to those new to using a home
computer.
T171 - TMA covers the conception of the World Wide Web thanks to the British pioneer Tim
Berners-Lee
The World Wide Web
Introduction
The World Wide Web is a body of software, and a set of protocols and conventions.
Through the use of, hypertext and multimedia techniques, the web is easy for any one to
roam, browse, and contribute to.
Follow These Links for Further Interesting Information.
The Growth of the Web
The Inspiration for the World Wide Web started with the following people.
1: Vannevar Bush 2: Douglas Engelbart 3:
Theodor (Ted) Nelson
Vannevar Bush
Vannevar Bush was an electrical engineer and inventor, who in the 1930s,
constructed the first analog computer, and sowed the first seed. He was obsessed with
modern science, and wrote an article about how he perceived the future to be. He
considered a future device for individual use. It was like a mechanized private file and
library. He called it the Memex.
The idea of this article was that machines would be needed to help humankind, to cope
with the information of the future. This was ultimately to trigger the Web. The article
was shelved until after the Second World War. Atlantic Monthly, an intelligentsia
magazine published it, it was called As We May
Think.
Memex Image
(Courtesy of Open University August 2001)
Douglas C Engelbart
Douglas C. Engelbart read the article by Bush, which remained an inspiration in his
work. After working for NASA for
a while, he went onto pursue his dream, which was to inspire successive generations of
computer scientists. He would devote his life to a crusade to use computer power to
augment human capabilities. This he achieved, and with his team went onto invent
bit-mapped screens, graphics-based interfaces, multiple windows, and many other things.
He also invented the
Mouse, used today on millions of desktops worldwide.
Theodor (Ted) Holm Nelson
Another person to whom, the article made an impact was Ted Nelson, a man in pursuit
of his dream, which was the Xanadu project. The idea was, all media contents were to get
permanent addresses, which can be addressed by any one independent of their documentary
context. The project has been in development for more than 30 years. The Xanadu
connective structure is extremely different from that of HTML or any system. The
structure consists of both links and transclusions, Nelson made the connection in the
technology needed to drive the associative linking, envisioned by Bush. He came up with
the notion of "nonsequential writing"; He later coined the term hypertext.
Xanadu project. Example of Parallel Documents
(Courtesy of www.xanadu.com August 2001)
"Why the Need for Change?"
Pioneers such as Vannevar Bush, Douglas Engelbart, and Ted Nelson, started the idea
of the Web. However, it took Berners-Lee to bring it to fruition. He had read, "Enquire"
a book similar to "As We May Think" by Bush. The vision he had of the Web is about
anything, being potentially connected, with anything. He saw the web as an open
challenge.
The goal Berners-Lee wanted to achieve was global communication, for all, not just the
elite. He devised a way of using hyperlinked documents, while working at CERN. In his
spare time, he wrote the program "ENQUIRE" (Using Ideas from the book). It was a notebook
program, which allowed links to be made between arbitrary nodes. Each node had a title, a
type, and a list of bi-directional typed links. It was never published; this program
formed the conceptual basis, for the future development of the World Wide Web.
By 1980, there were many obstacles in the way of exchange information on the Internet.
There were also many computer network systems, but few shared common features. A user had
to understand complicated and inconsistent systems. Big investments had to be made by
users, because information had to be accessed in different ways. There was a great need
to have a way of linking connections on the Internet. Tim Berners-Lee dream was to have
computers linking via the Internet worldwide. He achieved this with the hypertext system,
and its protocols.
These Images Show: The Need for Change
|
(Image Courtesy of www.zelster.com August 2001)
|
Introduction to Tim Berners-Lee
The Englishman, Tim Berners-Lee changed things forever on the Internet, by allowing
information to be obtained from any source, and in a simple way. He developed the
Hypertext System and protocols, otherwise known as the World Wide Web. The idea was that
documents should be editable by their readers. The system grew rapidly, and allowed
communication globally. Berners-Lee is currently the director of the World Wide Web
Consortium, and he occupies the 3Com Founders chair, at the M.I.T Laboratory for Computer
Science, where he is currently employed.
Tim Berners-Lee shows an image of an early System Browser
(Image Courtesy of CERN August 2001)
The World Wide Web
(The Development)
Berners-Lee, worked for Cern as a software engineer in
1989. He proposed a global hypertext project. This was to be known as the World Wide Web Hypertext project.
Working in collaboration with Robert Cailliau in 1990. They went onto develop the
protocols i.e. (HTTP) Hypertext Transfer Protocol, (URL) Uniform Resource Locator, and
(HTML). Hypertext Mark-up
language. One of the main features of the World Wide Web documents is their
hypertext structure.
Hypertext Structure (Courtesy www.zelster.com August
2001)
Hypertext is a way to link, and access information of various kinds, as a web of
nodes, in which the user can browse at will. It provides a single user interface to large
classes of information reports, notes, databases, computer documentation, and on-line
help. In November 1990 Berners-Lee and Cailliau wrote the first WWW client, a What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get (WYSIWYG)
hypertext browser/editor that ran using NeXTStep, it was very
sophisticated but only available on NeXT machines. This
was unsuitable for their needs. They needed a browser that would function on
non-graphical displays. Nicola Pellow (an English graduate student) achieved this by
writing a simple Line-Mode
browser.
The World Wide Web Is Like A Living Entity Which Awakens At The Press Of A
Key© (Authors Quote)
The World Wide Web
(The Launch)
CERN launched the Web in 1991. It was clear that the small team at CERN, could not
do all the work needed to develop the system further, so Berners-Lee put a plea out via
the Internet for other developers to join in. Marc Andreessen, and Eric Bina, working for
the National Center for Supercomputer Applications (NSCA), took up the plea; in 1993,
they had released their first version of a Mosaic browser, this Mosaic version was
created in under three months, it had multiplied tenfold in little over five months. The
software ran in the X Window System environment.
The idea of a browser is as a software tool, for viewing and navigating, through a web of
hypertext documents like a Mosiac Browser. Andreessen was interested in combining the
existing Internet framework, with the multimedia applications made available by
hypertext, and the World Wide Web. At the time, it was difficult to find and access
documents on the Internet. It was then necessary to learn the usage of such programs as
FTP, Gopher, and Telnet, to utilize the Internet.
The Impact
The impact of the World Wide Web on the world is phenomenal. Tim Berners-Lee
provided a global communication system, which has been likened to a giant database. Last
year Internet firms spent 293m in the UK. At the end of May of this year, the numbers of
homes connected to the net is 10 million - up from 6 million a year earlier. The figures
mean that every eight seconds one UK household is connected to the Internet for the first
time. In turn, they log onto the hypertext language, to browse the World Wide Web. 429
Million people worldwide have Internet access.
Conclusions
(Against the World Wide Web)
Ted Nelson has a different view of the Web:
"Word processing is a completely
warped process," he says. Windows 95 is little more than "Scrabble tiles,
with font sugar on top" He calls the Web "wonderful for people who like unfinished
writing", and in an article from Xanalogical Media goes onto say. The World Wide Web is a
delivery system for separate closed units - a system that allows only embedded links
pointing outward. This is simple but naive - creating a tangle of ever-breaking one-way
links, breaking whenever documents are moved, or modified. It postpones the real
problems. It would be in the greater interest of the industry if his work were completed,
for without the inventor, we would have no comparison and without comparison, progress
would stand still.
Reasons for the World Wide Web
Without the World Wide Web being in the public domain, access would be denied to
the average person. If any company, or person, had owned the World Wide Web, its growth
would have become stunted. Berners-Lee designed the World Wide Web and deliberately kept
it
Non-Proprietary, and Free. The Web should remain an open standard for
all to use. It started elitist; but rapidly turned into a mass medium. From the start he
was convinced
HTML, would be the
only language to survive the future. Berners-Lee, and the World Wide Web consortium, has
as their goal the need to lead the Web to its full potential. The Consortium is always
looking for ways to improve the hypertext system; they see the future as needing to use
the following programmes,
SVG: Scalable
Vector Graphics XML Signature RDF-Model Data
and much more.
The World Wide Web is global, allowing for growth in any sector. New ideas are thought of
all the time, with input from even the smallest countries. Communication is the key,
allowing it to be so prolific; which is just as Berners-Lee had envisaged it. Progress
does not stand still; it is made by a combination of a person(s) idea, triggering another
idea. Inventions, which are overlooked or rejected, can sometimes be adopted years later
(Maybe Xanadu?). The celebrated historian of science, Thomas Kuhn, called this mindset a
paradigm (Ref: Open University T171: Module 3: Ref: 2.3 Deep Background: 3c).
The Future: Could be a programme called IT? Or even the popular
Open
Source software such as the operating system "Linux." Whatever it is, we owe
it to these men of vision to be "Open to suggestion and forward thinking."
References
INFORMATION FROM THIS REPORT CAN BE FOUND FROM THE FOLLOWING LINKS.
Additional Information
The information gathered, has been mainly obtained from the World Wide Web, and
from the T171 course work from The Open University. I also used the book "Where Wizards
Stay Up Late", authors Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon.
A Touchstone book Published by Simon and Schuster
With Gratitude To The Following Sites in Helping to Gather Information
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