HISTORY OF WEB

Submitted to: MA’AM SADIA MAJEED

Submitted by: Zarmeen Durrani (272)

BS VIII

DEPARTMENT OF MASS COMMUNICATION

NATIONAL UNIVERSITY OF MODERN LANGUAGES

HISTORY OF WEB
World Wide Web

The World Wide Web ("WWW" or "The Web") is a global information medium which users can
access via computers connected to the Internet. The term is often mistakenly used as a synonym
for the Internet itself, but the Web is a service that operates over the Internet, just as email and
Usenet also.

1980–1991: Invention and implementation

The development of the World Wide Web was begun in 1989 by Tim Berners-Lee and his
colleagues at CERN, an international scientific organization based in Geneva, Switzerland. They
created a protocol, HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP), which standardized communication
between servers and clients. Their text-based Web browser was made available for general
release in January 1992.

By October of 1990, Tim had written the three fundamental technologies that remain the
foundation of today’s web (and which you may have seen appear on parts of your web browser):

HTML: HyperText Markup Language. It is the markup (formatting) language for the web.

URI: Uniform Resource Identifier. A kind of “address” that is unique and used to identify to
each resource on the web. It is also commonly called a URL.

HTTP: Hypertext Transfer Protocol. It allows for the retrieval of linked resources from across
the web.

1992–1995: Growth

The World Wide Web gained rapid acceptance with the creation of a Web browser called
Mosaic, which was developed in the United States by Marc Andreessen and others at the
National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois and was released
in September 1993.

In April 1994 Andreessen cofounded Netscape Communications Corporation, whose Netscape

By the mid-1990s the World Wide Web had millions of active users.

The software giant Microsoft Corporation became interested in supporting Internet applications
on personal computers and developed its own Web browser (based initially on Mosaic), Internet
Explorer (IE), in 1995 as an add-on to the Windows 95 operating system.
1996–1998: Commercialization

IE was integrated into the Windows operating system in 1996 (that is, it came “bundled” ready-
to-use within the operating system of personal computers), which had the effect of reducing
competition from other Internet browser manufacturers, such as Netscape. IE soon became the
most popular Web browser.

By 1996, it became obvious to most publicly traded companies that a public Web presence was
no longer optional.[citation needed] Though at first people saw mainly[citation needed] the
possibilities of free publishing and instant worldwide information, increasing familiarity with
two-way communication over the "Web" led to the possibility of direct Web-based commerce (e-
commerce) and instantaneous group communications worldwide. More dotcoms, displaying
products on hypertext webpages, were added into the Web.

In 1996, Robin Li developed RankDex, the first Web search engine with a site-scoring algorithm
for results page ranking, and received a US patent for the technology. It was the first search
engine that used hyperlinks to measure the quality of websites it was indexing, predating the
similar PageRank algorithm patent later filed by Google. Li later used his Rankdex technology
for the Baidu search engine, which Li founded and launched in 2000.

Google Search, which was notable for its PageRank algorithm, was developed by Larry Page,
Sergey Brin and Scott Hassan between 1996 and 1997. Page referenced Li's work on RankDex in
some of his US patents for PageRank.

Google was eventually founded by Page and Brin in 1998.

1999–2001: "Dot-com" boom and bust

Low interest rates in 1998–99 facilitated an increase in start-up companies. Although a number
of these new entrepreneurs had realistic plans and administrative ability, most of them lacked
these characteristics but were able to sell their ideas to investors because of the novelty of the
dot-com concept.

Historically, the dot-com boom can be seen as similar to a number of other technology-inspired
booms of the past including railroads in the 1840s, automobiles in the early 20th century, radio in
the 1920s, television in the 1940s, transistor electronics in the 1950s, computer time-sharing in
the 1960s, and home computers and biotechnology in the 1980s.

In 2001 the bubble burst, and many dot-com startups went out of business after burning through
their venture capital and failing to become profitable. Many others, however, did survive and
thrive in the early 21st century. Many companies which began as online retailers blossomed and
became highly profitable. Traditional media outlets (newspaper publishers, broadcasters and
cablecasters in particular) also found the Web to be a useful and profitable additional channel for
content distribution, and an additional means to generate advertising revenue.

The sites that survived and eventually prospered after the bubble burst had two things in
common: a sound business plan, and a niche in the marketplace that was, if not unique,
particularly well-defined and well-served.

2002–present: Ubiquity

In the aftermath of the dot-com bubble, telecommunications companies had a great deal of
overcapacity as many Internet business clients went bust.

During this time, a handful of companies found success developing business models that helped
make the World Wide Web a more compelling experience. These include airline booking sites,
Google's search engine and its profitable approach to keyword-based advertising, as well as
eBay's auction site and Amazon.com's online department store.

This new era also begot social networking websites, such as MySpace and Facebook, which
gained acceptance rapidly and became a central part of youth culture. The 2010s also saw the
emergence of various controversial trends, such as the expansion of cybercrime and of internet
censorship.

Web 2.0

Beginning in 2002, new ideas for sharing and exchanging content ad hoc, such as Weblogs and
RSS, rapidly gained acceptance on the Web. This new model for information exchange,
primarily featuring user-generated and user-edited websites, was dubbed Web 2.0. The Web 2.0
boom saw many new service-oriented startups catering to a newly democratized Web.

Apple’s Safari was released in 2003 as the default browser on Macintosh personal computers and
later on iPhones (2007) and iPads (2010).

Safari 2.0 (2005) was the first browser with a privacy mode, Private Browsing, in which the
application would not save Web sites in its history, downloaded files in its cache, or personal
information entered on Web pages.

The first serious challenger to IE’s dominance was Mozilla’s Firefox, released in 2004 and
designed to address issues with speed and security that had plagued IE.

In 2008 Google launched Chrome, the first browser with isolated tabs, which meant that when
one tab crashed, other tabs and the whole browser would still function.

By 2013 Chrome had become the dominant browser, surpassing IE and Firefox in popularity.
Microsoft discontinued IE and replaced it with Edge in 2015.
In the early 21st century, smart phones became more computer-like, and more-advanced
services, such as Internet access, became possible. Web usage on smart phones steadily
increased, and in 2016 it accounted for more than half of Web browsing.