Reading The Book, How The Web Was Born

I just got through reading the fascinating book “How The Web Was Born”, by James Gillies and Robert Cailliau, and published by Oxford University Press (originally published in 2000 but republished in 2007). At 372 pages it takes some getting through but I was surprised how quickly the time went when reading it – it’s definitely worth a re-read.

“How The Web Was Born”, offers a fascinating insight into the early days of the internet, and the ideas that became the world wide web told from the perspective of people who were there. We pretty much take the web today as granted and easily name change between calling it the internet and the web even though the two are different things.

It is really quite surprising that even into the 1990s the world wide web was still finding its feet and this narrative shows how the world wide web evolved from a series of humble beginnings with big ideas as a side project at CERN, and slowly developed following numerous struggles with various political and business factors. The Mosaic browser, for example, only emerged in 1993 but paved the way for a revolution in thinking about how we present, and most importantly share, our information.

Midway through the book we discover that Tim-Berners Lee developed his first web browser and server prototype on the NeXT operating system, an operating system from the NeXT company setup by Steve Jobs after he left Apple in 1985. When reading the description of how the browser worked on the NeXT operating system it feels more like a Wiki than the HTML browser based web pages we are familiar with today.

The Timeline, included in the Epilogue, is interesting as it notes important dates and events which, combined, formed the building blocks of computing, communications, the internet and of course the world wide web. For example, we learn that Tim-Berners Lee wrote his seminal paper “Information Management: A Proposal” in 1989, that commercial use of the internet was allowed in 1991, and the W3C was formed in 1995

The book is sprinkled with photographs and images of the time which help add a sense of clarity and familiarity to proceedings – the book is an excellent read and highly recommended. Let’s hope it get’s a new revision soon.