[LINK] Happy 20th Birthday WWW

[Tom Koltai]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: link-bounces at mailman1.anu.edu.au 
> [mailto:link-bounces at mailman1.anu.edu.au] On Behalf Of Sylvano
> Sent: Friday, 13 March 2009 11:42 AM
> To: Link
> Subject: [LINK] Happy 20th Birthday WWW
> 
> Champagne all around, then...
> 
> March 13 marks 20 years of World Wide Web, though for me it 
> is a little later as I only met the web when acquiring the 
> Mosaic browser in '93 I think, which was the beginning of the 
> end of using Archie, Veronica and gopher.
> <SNIP>

That's not quite how I remember it.
>From Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Berners_Lee
Sir Timothy John Berners-Lee, OM, KBE, FRS, FREng, FRSA (born 8 June,
1955) is an English computer scientist and MIT professor credited with
inventing the World Wide Web. On 25 December, 1990 he implemented the
first successful communication between an HTTP client and server via the
Internet with the help of Robert Cailliau and a young student staff at
CERN. 

Which would make the 25th of December 2010 the effective 20 year mark.

However, I bring your attention to : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sgml

Which according to one recollection by Charles Goldfarb:
http://www.sgmlsource.com/history/roots.htm
And I quote:
---------------------
Later in 1969, together with Ed Mosher and Ray Lorie, I invented
Generalized Markup Language (GML) to solve the data representation
problem. GML was not merely an alternative to procedural markup, but the
logical representation that motivated all processing. Ed recalls:

    We called it Text Description Language at first, because I think
that's what we thought it was. We certainly very early intended to use
it as a common and general markup to be "translated" into Script
[formatting] controls, ATMS & TERMTEXT & MTSC [formatting] codes, STAIRS
[information retrieval descriptor] paragraph codes, as well as using an
un-filled-in outline of tags as a prompter from which to create a new
document. 

------------------
And it became HTTP in 1990 - but its popularity was driven by LYNX:

And I quote the relevent passage:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynx_(web_browser)
-----------
Lynx was a product of the Distributed Computing Group within Academic
Computing Services of the University of Kansas, and was initially
developed in 1992 by a team of students at the university (Lou Montulli,
Michael Grobe and Charles Rezac) as a hypertext browser used solely to
distribute campus information as part of a Campus-Wide Information
Server. In 1993 Montulli added an Internet interface and released a new
version (2.0) of the browser.[1][2]
-----------
With a paralell commercial development of Mosaic
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosaic_browser
-----------
Development of Mosaic began in December 1992. Version 1.0 was released
on April 22, 1993, followed by two maintenance releases during summer
1993. A port of Mosaic to the Commodore Amiga was available by October
1993. Version 2.0 of NCSA Mosaic was released in December 1993, along
with version 1.0 releases for both the Apple Macintosh and Microsoft
Windows. An Acorn Archimedes port was underway in May 1994.
-----------

So it is either the 40th birthday of Mark-up language or for HTML we
have a wee way to go before its 20th birthday. 21 months in fact.

Tom


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