How the Web Was Born
By Eugene E. Kim
Billy Wilder once said that hindsight is 20-20. When we take the time to examine the past, we find that he's usually right. The problem is that we often don't bother.
Consider the World Wide Web. Most of us take its existence for granted, choosing to focus on where we can go rather than how we got here. It's impossible to do the former, however, without knowing about the latter.
James Gillies and Robert Cailliau's How the Web Was Born is a welcome cure to our nearsightedness. The authors not only examine the Web's direct past but also explore the evolution of its intellectual forebears. In the process, they reveal several important insights about the Web.
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How the Web Was Born
By James Gillies and Robert Cailliau
Oxford University Press, 2000, 372 pp.
$40
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Why Did the Web Succeed?
Tim Berners-Lee submitted the first paper describing the Web to a conference in 1991. The paper was promptly rejected. According to conference organizers, the Web was just too simple. Hypertext systems had been evolving for almost 25 years, and many felt that the Web was a step backward.
Today, we can laugh at these peoples' lack of foresight, but to understand the Web's wild success, we need to examine the climate that preceded and surrounded its creation.
This investigation is a strength of Gillies and Cailliau's book. Berners-Lee wasn't aware of the pioneering work on hypertext by Doug Engelbart, Ted Nelson, and others, and he wasn't involved in the Internet's creation.
