Today’s news stories include an item on CERN’s initiative to re-create the very first web page, and it included a tiny bit of history of the web.
The only trouble? Their (the BBC’s that is) history of the web doesn’t quite match my memories of how it happened, and as it so happens I was there. Not at CERN of course, and I can’t claim to be a particularly significant part of the history of the web. But I did create one of the earliest web servers in 1992, and again in 1993 (the archived copy was made in 1997).
The big error in the BBC’s article was the importance of the discussion of whether CERN should try to retain control of the web or leave it to the public to decide. Whilst that decision was undoubtedly important – particularly for keeping the web standardised – it wasn’t quite as important as described as by 1993, the web was already “out there”.
CERN did release the very first server software to support the web, and the very first web browser way back in 1991. The server software (at least by the time I saw it) was pretty much a standard Unix-based piece of software so it could be compiled and run on pretty much any Unix-based machine. The browser (WorldWideWeb) on the other hand was restricted to NeXT-based machines which were relatively rare; most people were restricted to a text based browser called Lynx. The popularity of the web took off when an NCSA project introduced a graphical web browser called Mosaic.
If it had not been for Mosaic, it is quite possible that another graphical web browser would have popularised the web anyway – CERN’s browser had shown what was possible. And Mosaic was not the only graphical browser being created at the time.
The other thing that is often overlooked was that CERN’s “web” wasn’t unique in being an application with a “browser” and a “server” that allowed information to be fetched across the Internet and displayed appropriately. One of the biggest competitors was Gopher, but there were others around at the time. Indeed most early web browsers would happily display “gopher pages”.
The unique “selling” point of CERN’s web, was the use of hypertext as the main content which allowed for information to be presented on the same page as navigation content – most alternatives would have hierarchical menus to browse through until you found the information you wanted at the bottom of the tree.
By 1993, CERN’s “web” was already so widely in use that they had no choice about keeping it to themselves; indeed the decision made by CERN was to formally make their software “public domain” but it was effectively after the horse had bolted.
This sounds like an attempt to trivialise what CERN did – it isn’t. They deserve plenty of credit for what they did, but neither should we forget that something very similar was already happening, and in the end it was the people who created the first interesting web pages and not just the people at CERN who deserve the credit for today’s web.