Weaving The Web
In this episode of Internet Origins, we explore Weaving the Web by Tim Berners-Lee. From the chaos of CERN’s research labs to the dawn of the digital age, Berners-Lee imagined a way for computers to share information as effortlessly as the human mind connects ideas. His invention—the World Wide Web—transformed the Internet from a tool for scientists into a living network of people, knowledge, and culture. This is the story of how a few lines of code, shared freely, reshaped the modern world.
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Episode Notes
This paper presents the World-Wide Web (W3) project, developed at CERN to enable universal access to interconnected online information through hypertext. It describes W3’s architecture of clients, servers, and protocols, outlines existing implementations, highlights collaborative global adoption, and discusses future enhancements for seamless information sharing and retrieval.
Transcript
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00:06 - 00:30 The Internet and the World Wide Web are not the same thing. Though the distinction has become nearly invisible, the difference is crucial. One is like the electricity flowing through your walls, while the other is the light bulbs and appliances that make that electricity actually useful. The Internet is infrastructure, a network of networks that allows computers to send packets of data to each other.
00:30 - 00:53 Invented around the 70s, it was a marvel of engineering. Completely decentralized, able to route around damage, it connected universities and research labs across America, and eventually, the world. By 1988, if you were at MIT, you could send an email to someone at Stanford. You could transfer a file using something called FTP.
00:54 - 01:02 You could join text-based discussion groups about specific topics. But here's what you couldn't do. Browse. Explore.
