The History of Hypertext

Unknown to your average "surfer," the "World Wide Web" is only about 10 years old. It's amazing when one considers the critical role the web plays in the day-to-day exchange of information, especially in the business world. There's probably not a single major corporation today that doesn't rely on the web in some way, shape, or form to accomplish its thousands of daily tasks at the speed of light. But how did we get here? Where did this "web" come from? I found myself asking these very questions as I surfed the net, so I decided to look around for some answers. And here's what I found.

Way Back When

With the US in the middle of a world war in the 1940's, it's scientists were forced to come together to produce new and interesting ways to transport troops, own the skies, and ultimately destroy our enemy. But as victory was achieved, many scientists found themselves in a new and strange position. They had become accustomed to the sharing of data and ideas in order to produce better results at a faster rate. Now that the US war machine wasn't needed, many scientists sailed into the doldrums of collaborative thinking.

But just because times were slow didn't mean anyone was giving up. Scientists were throwing out ideas all over the place with regards to developing a network of data and information. One such man, who would later be renowned as a visionary, proposed some very interesting and thought provoking ideas. His name was Vannevar Bush and in 1945 he published an article entitled "As We May Think" in the Atlantic Monthly. In the article he discusses the need for information organization among other things. He states:

The idea seems commonplace now, but in a time when scientists were struggling to piece together computers that occupied entire rooms and did little more than add and subtract, his ideas were both radical and inspiring. His ideas would lead others to develop what is known today as "hypertext."

Hypertext

Hypertext is at the heart of every web transaction. Hypertext is a database of sorts. The idea being that in this database, one can navigate directly to information from the database display itself.2 To best illustrate hypertext, think of a web page. Your browser has taken hypertext that has been formatted with a markup language, HTML, and rendered it to display properly on your screen. This hypertext database contains all sorts of information like text, images, sound, video, etc. Depending on how the author of the hypertext organized the web page, data may be immediately presented to you, or you may have to click on text, a button, or an image to navigate to even more data.

The term hypertext was around long before the web made it into our daily lives. In 1965, Ted Nelson coined the term. He envisioned a method by which copyrighted material could be shared and reused as much as necessary.3 In interviews, he seems almost disgusted with the state of the web today. He believes that there should be more order to web in general. He now heads the Xanadu project which seems to still be fighting the web. On the Xanadu site, the hypertext introduction reads, "Today's one-way hypertext-- the World Wide Web-- is far too shallow. The Xanadu project foresaw world-wide hypertext decades ago, and endeavored to create a much deeper system. The Web, however, took over with a very shallow structure." The project seems to think it can right the wrong of the web, but I have my doubts.4

Application of Hypertext

Hypertext sat around for almost two decades without ever being put to use in any sort of broad application that would impact your average computer user. But in 1986, Apple Computers changed all of that with the release of HyperCard. HyperCard was, and still is, quite impressive. HyperCard allowed users who knew nothing about computer programming to create extensive, portable, and most importantly, usable applications.5

HyperCard worked using hypertext under the hood. Users created simple objects like buttons and text boxes by clicking and dragging the mouse. Then, the user told HyperCard how to interact with the other objects when used. This was all done, unknowingly by the user, with hypertext. All of the coding and compiling had been done. All the user had to do was tell the collection of objects how to interact with hypertext. There are various web sites on the net that explain HyperCard in great detail. Though the technology has fallen by the wayside, it's still interesting to see how hypertext helped to get us where we are today in the world of computing.6

The Creation of the World Wide Web

In late 1990, Tim Berners-Lee, a scientist at CERN, invented the World Wide Web to meet the demand for automatic information sharing between scientists working in different universities and institutes all over the world. CERN funded the project as Tim sought to create a network system with which a user could cross-reference information with the click of a mouse or the tap of a key. The basic idea was to create an automated way to lookup information in a manner similar to looking at footnotes in a journal article to find out where a writer obtained his or her facts.7

Hypertext provided a perfect solution. Since hypertext is nothing more than text with links to further information, it was perfect for the foundation of what would be coined the "world wide web." Tim proceeded to write a simple web server and web browser with his team at CERN, changing the face of the Internet forever.

The Birth and Growth of the Web as We Know It

So now that Tim Berners-Lee had created this client-server idea called the world wide web, the usability of the two applications desperately needed some work. As it was, there were only two browsers: one that ran only on NeXT machines (an older OS that never really caught on for mainstream use), and another text-based browser that severely lacked in the way of user-friendliness. Quickly Tim and his team at CERN were being overwhelmed by the growing demands for functionality of both clients and servers. Tim realized that they would have to expand their development, so Tim sent out the SOS via the Internet for other developers to join in.8

Early in 1993, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois released a first version of their Mosaic browser. This software ran in the X Window System environment, popular in the research community, and offered friendly window-based interaction. Shortly afterwards NCSA released versions also for the PC and Macintosh environments. With the release of these browsers, web traffic exploded from only 500 known web servers in 1993, to over 10,000 in 1994.9

In January 1995, the International World-Wide Web Consortium (W3C) was founded "to lead the World Wide Web to its full potential by developing common protocols that promote its evolution and ensure its interoperability" and headed by none other than Tim Berners-Lee. Even today, the W3C is the forerunner in laying out the principles and characteristics of the web. A quick visit to their site reveals the numerous web technologies that they develop free to the world. The W3C is funded by several hundred major corporations that have W3C board members who provide input to the W3C to help guide the development of the Web in the ways that the major corporations see fit.10

Closing Thoughts

So even though the web is a fairly new concept, we now see that it's been in the works for well over 50 years. Even today, the web and the technologies that make it work continue to grow and become more robust. But even as all of the applications that run the web change, one thing remains fairly constant: the hypertext medium in which data is transported. It just goes to show that a well-thought out, and well-developed idea can stand the test of time. My hat is off to Tim Berners-Lee and the CERN team that took the initiative to build a web architecture based on open standards so that all the world could benefit from the vast wealth of knowledge that we now simply call, "the web."

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