The Historical Context of Using the Web Application on the Internet Platform

The World Wide Web is an elective application for sharing documents on the Internet platform, built at CERN in 1990 on networks and protocols that other people had already built, and the World Wide Web is not an internet, not internetworking, and not the Internet, as paragraph 1.5 of this page documents.

1. The World Wide Web is an application that runs across the Internet platform, and this page names who built each layer and when.

1.1 The World Wide Web is an application-layer information system that runs across the Internet platform. Tim Berners-Lee proposed the Web at CERN in March 1989, Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau co-authored the funding proposal of 12 November 1990, and the application those proposals describe is not the Internet platform that carries the application.

1.2 This page answers three questions for the historical record, what the Internet and the Web each are, what the making of each consisted of, and who made each, and this page answers each question with named people, dated documents, and the kind of contribution each person made, because invention, implementation, standardization, adoption, and physical construction are five different kinds of work.

1.3 The layering of the Web application on the Internet platform is the whole point, because the system beneath the application is itself two distinct things, documented at The Internet Is a Network of Networks, Not a Protocol and at The Internet Protocols: The Label, the Receipt, the Postmen.

1.4 The satire of this record gives the layering its name, the wrap: WWW: The World Wide Wrap states the same fact in the register of the Mexican food party, where the World Wide Web is a tortilla wrapped around a feast that already existed, and this page and WWW: The World Wide Wrap state one fact in two registers.

1.5 The World Wide Web is one application among many that run across the Internet platform, and using the Web is elective: a person with Internet access can send electronic mail, transfer files by the File Transfer Protocol, log in to a remote computer by Telnet, and read Usenet news without ever opening a Web browser, because each of those applications existed before the Web, as the list of paragraph 3.1 of this page dates. Just as an application elects TCP for retransmission, as paragraph 4.2 of this page states, a person elects the Web for its documents, and the World Wide Web Consortium's own FAQ describes the Web as an information space in which each resource carries a global identifier, the URI. The World Wide Web is an application for sharing documents, and the World Wide Web is not an internet, not internetworking, and not the Internet, in the three senses that The Governing Definitions hold apart.

2. The Web was built at CERN and beyond from 1989 to 1995 on ideas that date to 1945, by named people, and each person's part carries a date and a document.

2.1 The idea of linked documents came before the Web: Vannevar Bush described the memex in As We May Think, in The Atlantic in July 1945, as a hypothetical device that stored and linked information associatively; Ted Nelson coined the word hypertext in 1963, published the word in 1965, and pursued a universal library with bidirectional links and continuous version tracking through Project Xanadu; and Douglas Engelbart demonstrated the oN-Line System, NLS, with hypertext links, collaborative editing, and mouse-driven navigation, on December 9, 1968 at the Fall Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco.

2.2 Tim Berners-Lee wrote the first proposal for the Web alone, Information Management: A Proposal, in March 1989, while Tim Berners-Lee worked at CERN as a fellow, the position Tim Berners-Lee had held since returning to CERN in 1984, after an earlier period at CERN from June to December 1980 as an independent contractor.

2.3 Robert Cailliau, who joined CERN as a Fellow in 1974, had proposed the study of an internal hypertext system for CERN's documentation before the Web existed, and CERN's own speaker page for Robert Cailliau dates that proposal to 1988. Robert Cailliau co-authored the funding proposal of 12 November 1990, WorldWideWeb: Proposal for a HyperText Project, which carries two names on its byline, T. Berners-Lee and R. Cailliau.

2.4 Robert Cailliau described the meeting of the two proposals in his own words, in his interview published by Linköping University on September 12, 2023: Mike Sendall, who knew Robert Cailliau was working on something similar, asked Robert Cailliau to read the proposal of Tim Berners-Lee, and Robert Cailliau recognized in that proposal the idea Robert Cailliau had been pursuing, carried further. In the same interview Robert Cailliau said, "I didn't like the name World Wide Web. It was too long," and said that Robert Cailliau had suggested a name from Norse mythology, such as Loki.

2.5 Tim Berners-Lee wrote the first Web browser and editor, WorldWideWeb, and the first Web server on a NeXT computer that Mike Sendall, the supervisor of Tim Berners-Lee at CERN, had bought for evaluation, and Tim Berners-Lee wrote the first Web page and the first specifications for URLs, HTTP, and HTML, as the World Wide Web Consortium's own FAQ records. The first Web browser was not the first program used to retrieve information across interconnected networks, because WorldWideWeb read File Transfer Protocol, Usenet news, and NFS services that were already running, as paragraph 4.7 of WWW: The World Wide Wrap documents.

2.6 Nicola Pellow joined the project in November 1990 as an undergraduate mathematics student on a work placement from Leicester Polytechnic, and Nicola Pellow wrote the line-mode browser, a generic browser that could run on systems other than the NeXT, which carried the Web beyond the NeXT environment, as CERN's own history of the Web records.

2.7 The World Wide Web was announced publicly on August 6, 1991, as Fact 9 of The Governing Definitions records. On December 12, 1991, Paul Kunz and Louise Addis brought the first Web server outside Europe online at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, the laboratory renamed SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in 2008, and SLAC's records note that Paul Kunz brought the Web to SLAC after a September 1991 visit to CERN, where Paul Kunz met Tim Berners-Lee, and that the first goal was easier access to SLAC's SPIRES literature database.

2.8 Robert Cailliau and Nicola Pellow wrote the first Web browser for the Apple Macintosh, named Samba and also known as MacWWW, and the archived status page for Samba on the World Wide Web Consortium's history site lists the authors of Samba as R Cailliau and N Pellow, records that Samba was implemented in Think-C, and records version 1.0 of Samba as released in April 1993, after a pre-release version in December 1992.

2.9 The legal status of the Web software remained unsettled until April 30, 1993, when CERN placed the Web technology into the public domain through Robert Cailliau's work with CERN's Legal Service, as CERN's own speaker page for Robert Cailliau records, and Robert Cailliau recounted in the Linköping University interview that Robert Cailliau spent months in discussions with CERN's lawyers before the release. In February 1993, the University of Minnesota had announced licensing fees for its implementation of the Gopher server, so from April 30, 1993 the Web software carried no license fee while the University of Minnesota's Gopher server did.

2.10 Robert Cailliau called for the first International World Wide Web Conference in December 1993, and the conference was held at CERN in 1994 with 380 participants, as CERN's own speaker page for Robert Cailliau records the call and the venue. During 1995 Robert Cailliau took an active part in transferring the Web's development effort and standards activities from CERN to the World Wide Web Consortium, as the Internet Hall of Fame's own biography of Robert Cailliau records. Dan Connolly co-authored HTML 2.0 with Tim Berners-Lee as RFC 1866 of November 1995.

2.11 NCSA Mosaic was created by Marc Andreessen, a student, and Eric Bina, a staff member, at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and NCSA released Mosaic in 1993: CERN's own history records a first version for the X Window System early in 1993, and Fact 12 of The Governing Definitions records the release of NCSA Mosaic in November 1993. Mosaic displayed images inline with text rather than in separate windows, and Matthew Gray's MIT report on the growth of the Web states that the Web gained widespread popular use only after NCSA Mosaic became available in early 1993.

2.12 Matthew Gray's MIT Web Growth Summary counted 130 websites in June 1993, 623 in December 1993, 2,738 in June 1994, 10,022 in December 1994, 23,500 in June 1995, and about 100,000 in January 1996.

3. The Web's key technologies fall into three groups, the dishes that existed before the Web, the tortilla the Web added, and the layers added after the wrap.

3.1 The key technologies and contributions behind the Web fall into three groups, sorted by date: the dishes that existed before the Web, the tortilla the Web added, and the layers added after the wrap, as WWW: The World Wide Wrap states the analogy of record.

The dishes: technologies that existed before the Web.

1. Hypertext existed before the Web: Ted Nelson coined the word hypertext in 1963 and published the word in 1965, and the founding proposal of the Web, dated 12 November 1990, builds on hypertext as an established field.

2. FTP existed before the Web: the first proposed file transfer mechanisms date to 1971 at MIT, in RFC 114, and J. Postel and J. Reynolds published the official specification of the File Transfer Protocol as RFC 959 in October 1985.

3. Usenet existed before the Web: Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis, graduate students at Duke University, conceived Usenet in 1979, and Usenet was established in 1980 at Duke University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

4. TCP/IP existed before the Web: RFC 791 and RFC 793 were published in September 1981, and the suite labels traffic with IP addresses and, where an application elects TCP, retransmits lost segments, while the interconnected networks beneath the suite carry the traffic, as The Internet Is a Network of Networks, Not a Protocol states.

5. Electronic mail existed before the Web: Jonathan B. Postel published the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol as RFC 821 in August 1982.

6. Telnet existed before the Web: J. Postel and J. Reynolds published the Telnet protocol specification as RFC 854 in May 1983.

7. DNS existed before the Web: Paul Mockapetris introduced the Domain Name System in 1983 in RFC 882 and RFC 883.

8. SGML existed before the Web: the Standard Generalized Markup Language, ISO 8879 of 1986, is the markup family from which HTML derives.

The tortilla: what the Web added, beginning in 1990.

9. HTTP originated with Tim Berners-Lee as the transfer protocol for the Web, and the IETF published HTTP/1.0 as RFC 1945 in May 1996, by T. Berners-Lee, R. Fielding, and H. Frystyk.

10. HTML was shaped first by Tim Berners-Lee from SGML influences, and the IETF published HTML 2.0 as RFC 1866 in November 1995, by Tim Berners-Lee and Dan Connolly.

11. URLs and URIs originated with Tim Berners-Lee: RFC 1630 documented Universal Resource Identifiers in June 1994, and RFC 1738 specified Uniform Resource Locators in December 1994, by T. Berners-Lee, L. Masinter, and M. McCahill.

12. The WorldWideWeb browser-editor was the original browser-editor that Tim Berners-Lee wrote on a NeXT computer in 1990.

13. The Line Mode Browser was the early cross-platform browser that Nicola Pellow wrote in 1991, which broadened access beyond the NeXT computer.

The layers added after the wrap.

14. NCSA Mosaic, developed by Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, became available in early 1993 and brought inline images and a friendlier browser to a broader audience.

15. SSL originated at Netscape in the mid-1990s, and the IETF standardized its successor, TLS 1.0, as RFC 2246 in 1999.

3.2 Of the fifteen technologies in the list of paragraph 3.1, eight existed before the Web, five are the Web's own tortilla, and two arrived after the wrap.

4. The protocols beneath the Web were designed by named people from 1974 to 1983, and designing a protocol is not building a global network.

4.1 Robert Kahn and Vint Cerf published the design of the Transmission Control Program in May 1974, in A Protocol for Packet Network Intercommunication, in IEEE Transactions on Communications. RFC 791 and RFC 793 specified the Internet Protocol and the Transmission Control Protocol in September 1981, and the ARPANET switched to TCP/IP on January 1, 1983, as ARPANET Flag Day 1983 records.

4.2 The Internet Protocol does not deliver reliably, and RFC 791 says so in its own words: the Internet Protocol "does not provide a reliable communication facility." The Transmission Control Protocol adds retransmission for the applications that elect TCP, and the User Datagram Protocol, specified in RFC 768 of August 1980 by Jon Postel, carries data without retransmission, so reliable delivery is an optional feature of one transport protocol and not a property of the Internet protocol suite, as TCP: The Battlefield Protocol and IP: The Address Label Protocol document.

4.3 The protocol design drew on named predecessors. Louis Pouzin designed and directed the CYCLADES network in France, originated the datagram, and coined the term catenet in 1973; Gérard Le Lann worked with Vint Cerf and Robert Kahn to carry CYCLADES concepts into the original design of the Transmission Control Program; Hubert Zimmermann, who joined the CYCLADES team in 1972, later chaired the committee that defined the OSI reference model; Donald Davies of the National Physical Laboratory in the United Kingdom coined the terms packet and packet switching between 1965 and 1967 and initiated the NPL prototype network in 1967; and Paul Baran of the RAND Corporation developed packet switching techniques independently in the early 1960s.

4.4 Steve Crocker began the Request for Comments series with RFC 1 on April 7, 1969, and the Internet Engineering Task Force and engineers including Kirk Lougheed, Yakov Rekhter, Rob Coltun, Phil Almquist, and Dennis Ferguson refined and expanded the architecture. Kirk Lougheed and Yakov Rekhter sketched the Border Gateway Protocol on napkins in 1989 and published the Border Gateway Protocol as RFC 1105 in June 1989.

4.5 Robert Kahn's own words on his entry at the National Inventors Hall of Fame credit the many: "A lot of people were thinking about these ideas." Robert Kahn and Vint Cerf received the A.M. Turing Award for 2004, and the label fathers of the Internet acknowledges leadership in protocol design, but the label remains symbolic rather than literal, because designing a protocol is not building a global network.

4.6 The protocols of section 4 of this page moved data only where physical networks already connected, and the physical network that reached every continent was a separate build: Digital Island built the first autonomous global network on international private leased circuits beginning in 1996, as The Birth of the Internet and Infrastructure Activation vs End-to-End Transport Semantics document.

5. The protocols run only on physical networks, and building the physical network worldwide was a separate class of work.

5.1 The illustrative code samples below show the mechanisms of TCP/IP and WWW/HTTP, and those mechanisms depend on physical equipment and software systems at every step of the transmission chain.

5.2 Every transfer of information between two devices passes conceptually through the seven layers of the OSI model, descending through all seven layers on the sender's side and ascending through the corresponding layers on the receiver's side, and the diagram below shows the seven layers.

5.3 The seven layers of the OSI model do seven different jobs:

1. The Application Layer is where applications create data, and WWW/HTTP operate at the Application Layer.

2. The Presentation Layer formats, translates, and encrypts data.

3. The Session Layer establishes, maintains, and terminates communication sessions.

4. The Transport Layer carries data between hosts, and TCP, with retransmission, and UDP, without retransmission, both operate at the Transport Layer.

5. The Network Layer encapsulates segments into packets and routes the packets across networks, and IP operates at the Network Layer.

6. The Data Link Layer frames packets and forwards the frames to the next device.

7. The Physical Layer converts frames into electrical, optical, or radio signals and transmits the signals.

5.4 The software protocols that users see, whether TCP/IP or a Web browser, represent a small fraction of the whole system, and the software protocols neither independently nor physically constitute the Internet or the Web.

5.5 The realization of the Internet as a functioning global network required a separate class of effort, billions of dollars of capital investment, physical infrastructure on every continent, specialized hardware and software engineering, and expert human labor, and the software protocols alone could not bring the Internet into existence.

5.6 The chart below plots the proliferation of websites from 1991 to 2019.

5.7 Mark Nichols states that before 1996 no business case existed for regional ISPs to buy infrastructure from monopoly telephone companies or to interconnect with other ISPs worldwide, so a user could see a website only when the user's ISP connected to the website owner's ISP, most websites were visible only within small, regional network islands, and many people could not see Mark Nichols's own website for that reason. Mark Nichols states that most of the about 100,000 websites Matthew Gray counted in January 1996, before Digital Island's genesis in August 1996, lacked worldwide reach for that reason.

5.8 Digital Island began private investment in global internetworking in 1996, the InterNIC issued autonomous system number AS6553 to Digital Island, Inc. on August 29, 1996, and Digital Island's 1999 NASDAQ public offering funded more footprint, capacity, and redundancy. By 2000, Digital Island had interconnected all Tier-1 ISPs of the world, many through redundant interconnections in multiple metropolitan regions, reaching about 99 percent of the Internet-accessible population, as Ninety-Nine Percent of All Internet-Accessible Users documents, and Digital Island hosted and broadcast content for 881 customers.

5.9 Mark Nichols reads the website-growth chart as turning sharply upward about three years after Digital Island began hosting and broadcasting content, and Mark Nichols states that the worldwide uptake demonstrated demand that had waited for a global network able to carry the demand. Mark Nichols states that a global physical network, carrying the World Wide Web and every other application to every continent, reshaped global communication and commerce.

5.10 The constraint Digital Island removed is documented in its customers' own words and in the record's own instruments: Cisco Systems, whose equipment ran inside the incumbent carriers' networks, bought Digital Island's service under the $300,000 agreement of November 1996, as Cisco documents; the Cisco newsroom release of January 20, 1998 stated that Digital Island offered performance guarantees "generally unavailable through the public Internet" and described Digital Island's network as a private, single-hop global network that bypassed the congestion of the public Internet, as What Cisco Said About Digital Island records; the forty-three incumbent operators of the 1996 market, and the autonomous multi-continent fabric under AS6553 that none of the forty-three offered, are tested at The Digital Island Master Litmus Test; and the reach of about 99 percent of the Internet-accessible population by 2000 is documented at Ninety-Nine Percent of All Internet-Accessible Users, as paragraph 5.8 of this page states.

6. The locus index states where each claim on this page holds its permanent address.

6.1 The Birth of the Internet places the birth of the Modern Internet at 1996 to 1997, the years a global physical network first carried the World Wide Web and every other application to every continent, and The eCommerce Enablement Recordstates the commerce record of 1996 to 2001.

6.2 The Governing Definitions and Controlling Facts of Telecommunications Internetworking govern every term on this page, and Fact 9 and Fact 12 of The Governing Definitions hold the dates of the Web's public announcement and of the November 1993 release of NCSA Mosaic.

6.3 The people who put the Internet together are named at Who Made the Internet.

6.4 Corrections supported by documentation are welcomed and incorporated with attribution: mark@marknichols.com.