[ih] WWW date?

Terry Gray gray+history at washington.edu
Thu Oct 5 19:13:51 PDT 2006


Ian,
I was under the impression that the hypertext idea pre-dated Ted 
Nelson by some years; in particular, I've usually heard the concept 
attributed to Vannevar Bush in his 1945 article "As We May Think", in 
which he describes the "Memex" personal information machine...

  http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/194507/bush

No?

-teg

On Thu, 5 Oct 2006, ian.peter at ianpeter.com wrote:

>    As in many things it depends on what you mean by "birth of the web"
> 
>    Was it Ted Nelson's Xanadu? (probably the earliest direct origins with the
> concept of hypertext)
> 
>    Was it the concept of a url? (necessary pre-requisite)
> 
>    Was it html (necessary pre-requisite)
> 
>    Was it availability of a browser (necessary pre-requisite again)
> 
>    So you can probably spin it a bit earlier than 1989, but certainly the
>    Tim Berners Lee work brought this all together.
> 
>    Ive written a brief history a few years back at
> 
>    http://www.nethistory.info/History%20of%20the%20Internet/web.html
> 
>    and there are a few other links of relevance on the site. I realise
>    looking back at this I don't have a date for either url or html - did
>    any of these relevant standards precede the W3C split from IETF?
> 
> Ian Peter
> www.nethistory.info
> 
> 
> > > 
> > 
> 



More information about the Internet-history mailing list