Although personal computers were rapidly gaining popularity throughout the 1980s, their predominant usage at the time hardly reflect their use today. That was, at least, until the early 90s, when the World Wide Web was put into practice.
The World Wide Web, often referred to simply as “The Web”, was conceived in 1989 by British scientist Tim Berners-Lee, who had been searching for a way to automate information sharing within the scientific community. Berners-Lee accomplished this goal by merging computers, data networks, and hypertext (what allows a user to access related documents from a page by clicking on certain words and phrases). By the end of 1990, the first stages of the Web and the earliest form of a browser, which is what is needed to view the Web, were up and running. However, Berners-Lee’s invention was limited in that it was running on NeXT computers, a computer platform that few users had access to. Resolving this issue, Nichola Pellow wrote a ‘line-mode’ browser, allowing Berners-Lee to release his software in 1991. Soon after its release, the Web garnered major interest from all over the world.
However, the issue of the complexity of computers still remained. At the time, early browsers, including the ‘line-mode’ browser, were very difficult to understand and hard to use. It wasn’t until 1993 with the release of Mosaic, a “point-and-click” user-friendly browser that could display text and images on one page, that the Web really took off. Furthermore, Mosaic was soon released for PC and Macintosh use, the two most popular computers, meaning that even more people were able and willing to access the Web. As a result, the Web had 10,000 servers and about 10 million users by the end of 1994. Although the use of Mosaic has been predominantly replaced by Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, Apple’s Safari, and Google Chrome, the Web still persists, as all these browsers utilize the Web. The web’s influence and usage is so prevalent that many may not even know that they are using it, but, today, anyone who uses a computer has at least heard of the World Wide Web.
I really enjoyed reading this post and I thought that it was very interesting. I have never heard of Mosaic before, so I decided to look more into that. Mosaic was created by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), and what was so significant about it was that it was easy to use and it had many graphics. The World Wide Web was no longer just for computer geniuses. Mosaic had an "image tag," which allowed pictures to be included on web pages. NCSA discontinued Mosaic in 1997.
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I found your post really interesting and I'm surprised that I haven't heard more about the inventor of the modern internet. What interests me most about this topic in particular is the competitors that existed in the early days of the internet. Something I learned in French class was of a competitor to the early internet in France, called Minitel. The service could provide information on stock prices, weather reports, travel reservations, and one could message another person with the service. However, the service ultimately fell out of use when the internet developed and matured better than Minitel did. For many of the problems that existed with early computers, such as them being clunky and hard to use, also existed with Minitel.
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https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-18610692