A Short History of the Web: Or, Who Invented Cookies, Anyway?

What are cookies and why are they important? And who invented this wonderful Web we use everyday?

 Chocolate Chip Cookie, Wikipedia Commons

By cookies, I don't mean tasty chocolate chip cookies or other edible cookies but cookies stored on your computer, software programs which retain certain identifying characteristics about you, such as your name, and the IP (Internet Protocol) address of your computer.

These, along with much else about the Web were invented by folks in Europe and at MIT.

Let me clarify that. The Internet itself has existed since the U.S. Dept of Defense created a project in 1958 to keep U.S. military technology ahead of the Soviets, who had just launched Sputnik. This initiative was known as ARPA (Advanced Research Projects Agency) and was renamed in 1972 as the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency or DARPA. 

DARPA funded the development of computer technology, which housed the world's first large-scale computers capable of connecting researchers worldwide. These computers were the precursors to the graphical user interface we know today as the Web.

It was these early university researchers and a few other brave souls who were the Internet users of the 1960s and 1970s.

By the 1980s, the Internet was growing in popularity -- even with its clunky user tools. It was projected that the Internet would continue to grow in popularity, beyond anyone's wildest dreams.

Or beyond most people's wildest dreams. In 1989, in a physics lab in Geneva, Switzerland, one man, by the name of Tim-Berners Lee, slaved away on an early project. This project soon became the world's first Web site.

Tim Berners-Lee was born in London, of parents Conway Berners-Lee and Mary Lee Woods, mathematicians who had helped build the Manchester Mark I, one of the world's first computers.

Tim's mother had a fondness for spiders and used to string threads from the ceiling so the spiders could climb down.  I thought spiders were clever enough to manage on their own, but I guess the help was not unwelcome.

 Tim Berners-Lee, Wikipedia Commons

While at Oxford, Tim built a computer using an old Motorola processor, an old television, a soldering iron and electrical sockets.

After Tim graduated from Oxford in 1976, he worked for various companies. By 1980, while a contractor at the world's largest particle physics lab, known as CERN - the Centre pour Européenne Recherches Nuclear, Tim built a system that used hypertext - a language that would enable the sharing of information more easily than older Internet computers allowed.

How many of us used the Internet before the 1990s? Not many.  I used an early form of email, DECnet, in 1985 but did not use the Internet - or the Web until 1995.

By 1989, CERN had the largest Internet node in Europe, and Tim saw that the time was ripe merge his idea of a hypertext-based language with the older Internet world, to make a new, and then-barely foreseeable future of worldwide sharing of textual and visual information to anyone, free of charge.

By 1990, with the help of others, the World's first Web site was born at CERN, in August 1991. The first browser was called the WorldWideWeb.

Tim did not work alone. He brought other brilliant lights with him.

Dave Raggett, from the UK, was one such bright light. Dave was from Hewlett-Packard in the UK, and was the lead developer of the HTML language, which was based on an earlier markup language developed at H-P.

In 1994, Tim founded the Worldwide Web Consortium, the W3C.org at MIT. The purpose of the W3C was to be a standards-body, made up of many member companies, such as Microsoft and hundreds of others - that collaborated on technical standards to improve the web.

In 1994, the World Wide Web - the graphic interface over the Internet was very rough. Companies competed with products that did not work together. Netscape, founded by Marc Andreesen, was one such company. 

Did you kinow that the original code for the Netscape Navigator browser was written in 72 hours? That explains why this early browser did not work well. 

Also, do you know that we (at the W3C) were supposed to use the Netscape browser over the Microsoft browser, because it was known that Microsoft's browser had back-end holes, by which viruses could enter or from which  trade secrets could escape?  

What you see and hear when you get video and audio is the product of the team who developed SMIL -  Synchronized Multimedia Interface Language - that, by 1998 was under development but which would soon bring audio and video to the web.

Voice-based Web browsers in cars were first developed so that blind and visually impaired users could browse the Web.  The GPS-based phones were in early development in 1998 by the W3C.

The original members of the W3C,  now based at MIT, with mirror sites in France and Japan (and dozens of smaller offices worldwide), were a handful of eminent software engineers from the UK, France, Germany and the Nederlands, among others.

There are at least two other Gather members who - along with me - personally know some of these people. (Not to mention any names, but you know who you are). One Gather member also worked at the W3C but not at the same time when I was there.  Another Gather member hired one of the W3C software designers to work for him in his business.

It was Tim who coined the term, the World Wide Web and the use of the www.

Tim and his team coined the term, URL  - which originally stood for UniformResource Locator, then became known as Universal Resource Locator.

By the time I was consulting for the W3C,  it decided the URL acronym and abbreviation were too cumbersome to use and that most people called it the web address, and that that is what the URL should be so renamed. And so it was. 

Tim and a few others thought it would be a capital idea to have a visual interface to the Internet. Dave Raggett wanted to have the Internet resemble a magazine.

Others believed that increasing the sophistication of the user interface would be wonderful, and the capabilities we use today, such as style sheets, audio and video, and voice activated web browsers, were developed at the W3C in the 1990s.

Voice-activated browsers were first developed for blind and visually impaired users could browse the Web. 

GPS-based phones were in development in 1998 at the W3C.

Others of the original nine inventors of the web invented the now-infamous cookies. Cookies were a way to track information.

At the W3C.org cookies were considered a double-edged sword: it was important to be able to track information but it could be somewhat risky for users, as well. The W3C wanted to learn what early Web users were using the Web for  - an important piece of research.

As far back as 1998, Tim himself expressed the dangers of cookies: "We need to know certain information, but you don't want things to get out of hand so that when you walk into a store, they know everything about you, including your shoe size."

Cookies are part of the technology that Gather and other web sites use that enables people to search on specific search terms, such as the specifics you list in your profile.

As Tim himself said, ‘you don't want to walk into a store and they know everything about you, including your shoe size.'

On your profile on Gather and anywhere you go on the Internet  - always be aware that what you post may be visible to anyone or everyone who chances upon the Internet.

If you don't want your hometown or home state known, leave that out. Same with schools or any other information you may consider too specific.

I use my real name. I have a number of publications under my real name and wanted to use my real name, for that reason. Over the summer, some of my cousins found me, as did some old college buds. I am very glad they found me.

Enjoy the Web and the Internet but be aware that the world's 6 billion people may see what you post.

Or not. But the chance is always there.