After CERN's 50th anniversary in 2004, this year there is another anniversary: the first CERN Computer Newsletter (CNL) was circulated in 1966. As CNL celebrates its 40th year, we take a look back at some of the highlights of computing at CERN, seen through its pages. In this issue we concentrate on the 1990s and the articles in CNL that were related to the birth of the World Wide Web. For an extended retrospection read CNL, which is also available online from www.cerncourier.com.
A project for hypertext and browsable documents at CERN
[…] Depending on its complexity and distribution, a document will be presented to the users in one of the following forms:
- on paper (major manuals, or documents widely distributed outside CERN);
- as plain text for simple terminals (we hope all documents); or
- as a sophisticated version for workstations – these versions will be developed in the context of the hypertext project (currently being launched between ECP and CN). The major long-term aim will be to make machine readable versions browsable from outside CERN (CNL 200 July–October 1990).
World Wide Web: Online information for everyone
A world of information is now available online from any computer platform. Information sources at CERN and across the world span subjects from poetry to biochemistry and supercomputing. We summarize the information currently sourced at CERN, and we introduce the WorldWideWeb (W3) program which allows you to browse and search all of the data in a simple and consistent manner.
Details of all the information, and of how to acquire and install the W3 software on your own machine, are available by typing "telnetinfo.cern.ch" […] The browser described here is the simplest interface to the World Wide Web, which was designed to run on any dumb terminal. A hypertext browser/editor is available under NeXTStep. More powerful interfaces are being developed, including Macintosh, X-Windows, VM full-screen and emacs. Please send any comments, suggestions or queries to www-bug@info.cern.ch. T Berners-Lee, R Cailliau, J-F Groff and B Pollermann (CNL 204 October–December 1991).
W3 – Spring releases
The World Wide Web bounds into spring with some exciting software releases from outside CERN […] Statistics we take on the access to our server show an exponential increase, with a time doubling about every two months, and currently running at around 500 document fetches a day, […] many of these are from people telnetting to info.cern.ch, so if you haven't installed WWW on your own workstation, please do so! (by Tim Berners-Lee, CNL 206 March–April 1992)
New version of Mosaic available
Mosaic is an X11-based application to browse information stored in the World Wide Web system. It has been developed at NCSA and provides at present the best user interface available on Unix workstations.
We have released into the Public Area the Unix, VMS and Macintosh versions of Mosaic 2.2 (CNL 215 January–March 1994).
Author:
Compiled by Hannelore Hämmerle and Nicole Crémel