1991 —- The year the world changed
This was shared over on Hacker News today. What a gem. My favorite line is “However, it could start a revolution in information access.”
The WorldWideWeb application is now available as an alpha release in source
and binary form from info.cern.ch.WorldWideWeb is a hypertext browser/editor which allows one to read information
from local files and remote servers. It allows hypertext links to be made and
traversed, and also remote indexes to be interrogated for lists of useful
documents. Local files may be edited, and links made from areas of text to
other files, remote files, remote indexes, remote index searches, internet news
groups and articles. All these sources of information are presented in a
consistent way to the reader. For example, an index search returns a hypertext
document with pointers to documents matching the query. Internet news articles
are displayed with hypertext links to other referenced articles and groups.The code is not strictly public domain: it is copyright CERN (see copyright
notice is in the .tar), but is free to collaborating institutes.Also available is a portable line mode browser which allows hypertext to be
browsed by anyone with a dumb ascii terminal emulator. Hypertext may be made
public by putting on an anonymous FTP server, or by using a HTTP daemon. A
skeleton HTTP daemon is also available in source form. A server may be written
to make other existing data readable by WWW browsers. Files are/pub/WWWNeXTStepEditor_0.12.tar.Z NeXT application + sources
/pub/WWWLineMode_0.11.tar.Z Portable Line Mode Browser
/pub/WWWDaemon_0.1.tar.Z Simple serverBasic documentation is enclosed. Details about our project and about hypertext
in general are available in hypertext form on our servers, as are lists of
known bugs and features.This project is experimental and of course comes without any warranty
whatsoever. However, it could start a revolution in information access. We are
currently using WWW for user support at CERN. We would be very interested in
comments from anyone trying WWW, and especially those making other data
available, as part of a truly world-wide web.Tim BL
___________________________________________________________________________
Tim Berners-Lee ti…@info.cern.ch
World Wide Web project Tel: +41(22)767 3755
CERN Fax: +41(22)767 7155
1211 Geneva 23, Switzerland
