The World Wide Web

• The World Wide Web is an architectural framework for accessing linked documents spread out over millions of machines all over the Internet. Its enormous popularity stems from the fact that it has a colorful graphical interface that is easy for beginners to use, and it provides an enormous wealth of information on almost every conceivable subject, from aardvarks to Zulus.

• The Web (also known as WWW) began in 1989 at CERN, the European center for nuclear research. CERN has several accelerators at which large teams of scientists from the participating European countries carry out research in particle physics.

• These teams often have members from half a dozen or more countries. Most experiments are highly complex and require years of advance planning and equipment construction.

• The initial proposal for a web of linked documents came from CERN physicist Tim Berners-Lee in March 1989. The first (text-based) prototype was operational 18 months later. In December 1991, a public demonstration was given at the Hypertext '91 conference in San Antonio, Texas.

• This demonstration and its attendant publicity caught the attention of other researchers, which led Marc Andreessen at the University of Illinois to start developing the first graphical browser, Mosaic.

• It was released in February 1993. Mosaic was so popular that a year later, Andreessen left to form a company, Netscape Communications Corp., whose goal was to develop clients, servers, and other Web software. When Netscape went public in 1995, investors, apparently thinking this was the next Microsoft, paid $1.5 billion for the stock.

• For the next three years, Netscape Navigator and Microsoft's Internet Explorer engaged in a ''browser war,'' each one trying frantically to add more features than the other one. In 1998, America Online bought Netscape Communications Corp. for $4.2 billion, thus ending Netscape's brief life as an independent company.