[ih] WWW dates

[Phill Gross]

Thanks to Terry Gray, Vint Cerf, Andrew Sullivan, Robert H'obbes' Zakon,
Noel Chiappa, Ian Peter, and others for the comments and references.

It led me on an interesting exercise of "associative indexing" on a rainy
afternoon.

Does anyone have any other references or details to add?

Phill Gross
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1945 - Vannevar Bush describes the "Memex" and "associative indexing",
concepts similar to Hypertext and the Web (perhaps even the personal
computer).   See Note 1 below.

Late 1950's-late 60's - Inspired by Vannevar Bush's 1945 article, Douglas
Engelbart founds the Augmentation Research Lab (ARC) at SRI.   See Note 2
below.

1960 - Ted Nelson founds Project Xanadu.  See Note 3 below.

1989 - Tim Berners-Lee initiates Web proposal within CERN ("Weaving the
Web", p22)

1989-early 90's? - Tim Berners-Lee "graft(s) hypertext capability onto a
homegrown SGML-like markup language" (Wikipedia).  Later publishes RFC 1630,
"Universal Resource Identifiers in WWW", June 1994, and RFC 1866, "Hypertext
Markup Language - 2.0", Berners-Lee&Connolly, Nov 1995.  See Note 4 below.

1989-90 - By Dec 89, a "browser/editor" is communicating with info.cern.ch
(presumably, still in testing mode)

1991 - March 91, WWW is being shared within CERN; May 91, visitor Paul Kunz
takes a copy of the system back to SLAC and introduces it to Louise Addis.

1993 - Release of NCSA Mosaic browser

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Note 1 - Vannevar Bush, from "As We May Think", 1945

"The human mind...operates by association. With one item in its grasp, it
snaps instantly to the next...in accordance with some intricate web of
trails... .   associative indexing...a provision whereby any item may be
caused at will to select immediately and automatically another. This is the
essential feature of the memex. The process of tying two items together is
the important thing." (The Atlantic Monthly; July 1945; "As We May Think";
Volume 176, No. 1; 101-108, www.theatlantic.com/doc/194507/bush)

Note 2 - From various sources, including Wikipedia

The Augmentation Research Lab (ARC) focuses on human-computer interfaces and
pioneers work in bit-mapped screens, Windowed GUI's, linked documents,
groupware, etc in the "Online System" (NLS). Engelbart writes "Augmenting
Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework" in 1962. He applies for patent on
the computer mouse in 1967 (U.S. Patent 3,541,541). Gives notable "mother of
all demos" in Dec 1968, which demonstrates the features of NLS. (various
sources)


Note 3 - Ted Nelson and Xanadu, From Wikipedia

Theodor Holm Nelson...American sociologist, philosopher, and pioneer of
information technology. ...coined the term "hypertext" in 1963 and published
it in 1965. ... The main thrust of his work has been to make computers
easily accessible to ordinary people. His motto is: "A user interface should
be so simple that a beginner in an emergency can understand it within ten
seconds." ...founded Project Xanadu in 1960 with the goal of creating a
computer network with a simple user interface.  ... The Xanadu project
itself failed to flourish, for a variety of reasons which are disputed.
Journalist Gary Wolf published an unflattering history, The Curse of Xanadu,
on Nelson and his project in the June, 1995 issue of Wired magazine. ...
Some aspects of its vision are in the process of being fulfilled by Tim
Berners-Lee's invention of the World Wide Web. The Web owes much of its
inspiration to Xanadu, but Nelson dislikes the World Wide Web, XML and all
embedded markup, and regards Berners-Lee's work as a gross
over-simplification of his own work: "HTML is precisely what we were trying
to PREVENT- ever-breaking links, links going outward only, quotes you can't
follow to their origins, no version management, no rights management."
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Nelson) 

Note 4 - HTML

>From RFC 1866

   The HTML document type was designed by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN as
   part of the 1990 World Wide Web project. In 1992, Dan Connolly wrote
   the HTML Document Type Definition (DTD) and a brief HTML
   specification.

>From Wikipedia:

"HTML is defined in formal specifications that were developed and published
throughout the 1990s, inspired by Tim Berners-Lee's prior proposals to graft
hypertext capability onto a homegrown SGML-like markup language for the
Internet. The first published specification for a language called HTML was
drafted by Berners-Lee with Dan Connolly, and was published in 1993 by the
IETF as a formal "application" of SGML (with an SGML Document Type
Definition defining the grammar). The IETF created an HTML Working Group in
1994 and published HTML 2.0 in 1995, but further development under the
auspices of the IETF was stalled by competing interests. Since 1996, the
HTML specifications have been maintained, with input from commercial
software vendors, by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). ..."
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Html)