As of this moment, this (from Maggie, as it happens) is the one inarguably interesting (albeit inarguably geekoid) item I’ve found among the Twitterings I’ve seen so far: the first page posted on the infant World Wide Web.
The page was last updated Thursday, December 3, 1992, at 3:37:20 a.m. EST.
The Web was originally a project of CERN, the Swiss nuclear research organization more recently in the news for its work on the black-hole-creating, universe-destroying Large Hadron Collider. It grew out of a paper written by one Tim Berners-Lee (a/k/a “TBL,” often referred to in terms such as “the father of the Web”) and Robert Cailliau.
From the introduction to that paper, entitled “WorldWideWeb: Proposal for a HyperText Project”:
The attached document describes in more detail a Hypertext project.
HyperText is a way to link and access information of various kinds as a web of nodes in which the user can browse at will. It provides a single user-interface to large classes of information (reports, notes, data-bases, computer documentation and on-line help). We propose a simple scheme incorporating servers already available at CERN.
The project has two phases: firstly we make use of existing software and hardware as well as implementing simple browsers for the user’s workstations, based on an analysis of the requirements for information access needs by experiments. Secondly, we extend the application area by also allowing the users to add new material.
Phase one should take 3 months with the full manpower complement, phase two a further 3 months, but this phase is more open-ended, and a review of needs and wishes will be incorporated into it.
The manpower required is 4 software engineers and a programmer, (one of which could be a Fellow). Each person works on a specific part (e.g. specific platform support).
Each person will require a state-of-the-art workstation , but there must be one of each of the supported types. These will cost from 10 to 20k each, totalling 50k. In addition, we would like to use commercially available software as much as possible, and foresee an expense of 30k during development for one-user licences, visits to existing installations and consultancy.
We will assume that the project can rely on some computing support at no cost: development file space on existing development systems, installation and system manager support for daemon software*.
Ah, youth.
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* Aside to His Dark Materials
