[ih] WWW dates

Fri Oct 6 16:09:24 PDT 2006

Phill:

I don't want to speak for Alan Kay, but you can listen for yourself 
(see below), about Kay's brief observations of the difference between 
Engelbart's concepts and Berners-Lee concepts.  I have always wanted to 
go back to Engelbart's early work to see exactly what Alan meant.

Alan, Vint, Kahn, Roberts and an interesting variety of next generation 
pioneers participated in Kleinrock's hosting of a full-day of sessions 
celebrating the 35th anniversary of the ARPA Computer Network 
hosts/IMPS first communicating between SRI and UCLA.
Here's the link, and the videos are online:
http://internetanniversary.cs.ucla.edu/index.html

thanks, Chris

On Oct 6, 2006, at 5:06 PM, Phill Gross wrote:

> 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
> -----------
>
> 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
>
> -------
>
> 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)
>
Chris Edmondson-Yurkanan
(chris at cs.utexas.edu)
Contact info:  www.cs.utexas.edu/~chris/