Everyone now knows the World Wide Web, WWW, but not everyone knows that it was invented at CERN, the European Center for Particle Physics. The Web is an outstanding example of how basic research in physics can generate progress in a completely unforeseeable way: technology transfer at its best.
What is WWW? It is a set of protocols and programs which allow, at the click of a mouse, the access to information placed in several millions of computers located all over the world and interconnected in a world web, the Internet.
How did the Web start? In the eighties CERN was already a big research center with large accelerators, and it also was one of the main centers of scientific informatic networks and of telecommunication technology for scientific use. CERN had the necessity of keeping connected to CERN the 7000 visiting researchers from hundreds of Universities from all over the world. Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau proposed a distributed informatic system based on hypertexts: the information could be exchanged among many computers.
In 1995 the Minister for Scientific Research of the United Kingdom, together with CERN Director General, presented this unpredicted technological spin off, saying that it allowed “a farmer in a remote Scottish island to know immediately the last information on sheep-breeding from Australia” and “every middle school to have the largest world library in every small computer.”
WWW brought a revolution in our life; the fusion of the technology of communication, the computer technology and television will bring about a new revolution.
1) The first posters of WWW at CERN.
2) A grafic representation of Internet.
| World Wide Web Words |
Browser: A program allowing mouse-click access to the Web. The best known is Netscape
HTLM: HyperText Mark-up Language, the language in which Web documents are structured.
The Internet: The world-wide communication network among computers and computer networks.
HTTP: HyperText Transfer Protocol, the rules for communication between browsers and servers.
Hypertext: A way of linking related pieces of information on a computer. All hypertext addresses in WWW start with http://.
Multimedial: System which may visualize text, sound, still images and moving images.
Server: A computer holding Web documents accessible to browsers.
URL: Uniform Resource Locator, an address used by browsers to locate a document.
WWW, W3, the Web: Alternative names for the World-Wide Web.
