Today, internet websites have increasingly become a part of our lives and we rely on them for almost everything but many people are still not aware about the history of the World Wide Web. So here are some of the quick facts about it:
The World Wide Web was born in November 1990, with the launch of the first web server—and web page—hosted at the CERN research facility in Switzerland; the purpose of the web page was to describe the World Wide Web project.
By early 1993, the stage was all set for the web explosion when the first (alpha) releases its first client based application ‘NCSA Mosaic graphical browser’ which becomes available on all major desktop computing platforms by the end of that year.
After that the numbers of web pages grows but there were no ways to search the growing number of web pages that were available online as most of them were basically collections of links. And then finally, attempts were made to bring them in order to the swiftly growing chaos.
The first automated web spider or robot ‘World Wide Web Wanderer’ launched in 1993 by Mathew Gray, this spider did little more than collect URLs, and was largely seen as a nuisance by the operators of web servers. Than later that year Martjin Koster also created the first web directory ‘ALIWeb’ but just like Wanderer, it also met with limited success.
In February 1993, six Stanford graduate students began work on a research project called Architext, using word relationships to search collections of documents. By the middle of that year, this software was available for site search. More spiders had appeared on the scene by late 1993, but it wasn’t until early 1994 that searching really came into its own.
The Netscape browser, based on Mosaic, was later released in 1994, by that time; the dial-up Internet access has also become readily available and was cheaper. Combination of cheap dial-up access and the Mosaic browser was popularizing the Web and that was a time when the Web started taking off!
