1. Vannevar Bush
Two names are particularly significant in the history of the WWW. The first is this man, Vannevar Bush. In 1945 he published an article called "As We May Think" in which he proposed a machine called a memex.
Some think that the memex - which was never built - prophesies the Internet. It was a machine for retrieving information from a microfilm store. The interesting concept was that the memex would be able to "remember" links between "pages" of information. Bush believed this was how human minds actually worked, by making associations, not following traditional classfications of knowledge. This is close to the idea of hypertext, which we will look at on the next slide.
The memex was never built because the mechanical technology of Bush's time was inadequate. But when computers became commonplace, digitised information could make Bush's vision a reality.
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2. Tim Berners-Lee
The Internet has been around in some form since 1969 but for a long time was accessible only by large institutions such as businesses and universities. One such institution was CERN, the European Particle Physics Research centre. Researchers from all over the world gathered there, and brought with them many different computer systems and ways of processing and presenting information.
The system which became the WWW was designed by Tim Berners-Lee (above) who worked at CERN. He wanted a single system which could cope with all these different formats. This was - and remains - a very important key to the success of the WWW - its flexibility. The WWW does not force you to use a particular browser or operating system to access it. It is meant to be accessible to diverse systems.
Berners-Lee designed a system that brought together various existing technologies. Amongst them was his use of HTML, which basically described web content to a computer so that computer could present it to the reader. Though it has evolved slightly in the years since it was invented, it is HTML that you will be learning in this course.
Much more detail on the history of the WWW and Internet is given in chapter 2 of the printed course booklet. You can read that in your own time if you are interested.
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