Academic search: WWW, Hypertext, FTP, Browsers

Figure 16: Earthrise, taken on December 24, 1968, by Apollo 8 astronaut William Anders

‘hyperlinked’. Berners-Lee merged ‘a communication network linking various computers, an idea originated with the American Arpanet’ or a ‘distributed network’ with ‘hypertext’, ‘in which any type of information would be reachable from anywhere and directly linkable with any other content’ (Bory et al. 2016:5).³⁷ His ‘proposed mesh’ became what is now known as the World Wide Web, drawing upon Theodor Nelson’s coinage ‘hypertext’ (1967) and his ‘jumping metaphor’.³⁸ (Figure 17)

Figure 17: Berners-Lee proposal March 1989 with a jumping-link model. ‘A Proposal “Mesh”’ is what he then called ‘the web’ (Berners-Lee 1989:1).https://www.w3.org/History/1989/proposal.html

In their writings both authors promoted the ‘non-linear organization of information’, ‘the manipulability of documents’ along with ‘the difference between document and information retrieval’ and lastly, ‘the need for shared and compatible standards for all computing systems’

(Bory et al. 2016:7). Berners-Lee saw the web as a new space, not as a replacement for Nelson’s hypertext but as a ‘supplementary system, something to be added to any workstation to easily

37 Berners-Lee had already written a programme in 1980 called Enquire, ‘a personal information management program that is considered the precursor of the WWW’ (Bory et al. 2016:5).

38 ‘Although familiar with hypertext, having written Enquire in 1980 and knowing HyperCard, Berners-Lee used this term for the first time in his 1989 proposal: “I first made a small linked information system, not realizing that a term had already been coined [by Ted Nelson in 1965] for the technique: Hypertext”’ (Bory et al. 2016:7).

retrieve information’ (ibid:7-9). It was the promotion of ‘user-friendliness’ as a ‘faster and easier way of reaching existing documents and data’ (ibid:6) that sold the idea of the web to CERN‚ with Berners-Lee twisting George Eastman’s (Kodak) famous slogan to ‘“click the mouse, we do the rest,” without shaping the way in which information is produced’ (ibid:7).

Later that year HTTP (HyperText Transfer Protocol), the coding language that enables the user to jump from webpage to webpage, emerged. ‘HyperText is a way to link and access

information of various kinds as a web of nodes in which the user can browse at will. Potentially, HyperText provides a single user-interface to many large classes of stored information such as reports, notes, data-bases, computer documentation and on-line systems’ (Lee and Cailliau 1990).³⁹ Its architecture was based on ‘four technical components: Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), uniform resource identifiers (URIs, sometimes called ‘locators’ or uniform resource locators [URLs]), Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), and hyperlinks (encoded in HTML)’

(Berners-Lee and Fischetti 1999; Jacobs and Walsh 2004 cited by Plantin et al. 2017:301-302).⁴⁰ Comprised of content and HTML (HyperText Markup Language) webpages allowed

connectivity between various parties all over the world and anyone could access the World Wide Web, which became available for people outside the academic community in 1991.

However, in the late eighties the ‘manual’ still played a key role in navigating what was then known as the ‘pre-web’. The manual ‘pre-web’ concerned the publishing of personal bookmark files as web pages and storing these collections of URLs that accrued value, along with sharing them between groups of people.⁴¹

The collaborative filtering and tagging sites that are popular today descended from this practice, and the updating and annotating of links to interesting new websites led to some of the first proto-blogs. Most importantly, it gave rise to the first collaborative directories and search engines (Halavais 2009:22).

This type of search consisted of ‘[t]he first indexes on the internet [that] were created by hand, often by the users of the systems as a guide to others’ (ibid:21). In the early 1970s, whilst a student at MIT, Abhay Bhushan developed FTP (File Transfer Protocol) that enabled the secure transfer of files between ARPANET’s servers and computers. Subsequently File Transfer Protocol (FTP) made possible the moving of files between computers and entailed choosing the FTP from a list of servers. The user acquired this list of public servers from friends or

colleagues and there was often ‘a text document that could be downloaded that briefly summarised the content of each of the files on a given server’ (ibid). Eventually it became cumbersome to search the FTP servers and as their number enlarged so did their inconsistencies.

‘While the increase in content was a boon to those who used the internet, it became increasingly difficult to locate specific files’ (ibid).⁴²

Simultaneously universities were joining the network and the creation of Archie, a file-transfer-protocol (FTP) crawler designed at McGill University in Canada in September 1990, changed

39 ‘A program which provides access to the hypertext world we call a browser’ (Berners-Lee and Cailliau 1990).

40 ‘However, this ‘Open Web’ as it became known competed with the already established dial-up services from the 1980s, such as CompuServe, Prodigy, and American Online that were ‘walled gardens’ (Plantin et al. 2017: 301-302).

41 URLs today have value, as shown by my data visualisations, Re:search - Terms of Art (Appendix D), or how Tor’s hidden services are distributed between users in the know, as with the Hidden Wikis for the ‘Dark Net’

(Appendix I)or the public sharing of URLs via Twitter.

42 FTP continues to be used today as a way of transferring files.

everything. It searched and ‘indexed’ FTP sites and directories, which is why it could be

considered the first search engine. Archie was not searching the entire document nor discovering servers that were linked together but instead focussed on the titles of the files.

Nonetheless, it represented a first effort to reign in a quickly growing, chaotic information resource, not by imposing order on it from above, but by mapping and indexing the disorder to make it more usable (ibid:21-22).

Many have compared this description to the way the Web has grown, almost in a haphazard manner, collating things randomly from disparate sources or ‘like a library that consists of a pile of books that grows as anyone throws anything they wish onto the pile’ (ibid:22-23).

In 1992 a browser called Lynx evolved that used hypertext links in documents. Erwise was a graphical browser using the ‘libwww’ or the library of the World Wide Web, developed by a group of master students in Helsinki in 1992 but was never funded to advance further. One of the in-between steps transitioning from browsing files to the early beginnings of the internet was the Gopher system, seen still by some as an alternative to the World Wide Web, which

‘facilitated working through directory structures, and insulated the individual from a command-line interface’ (Halavais 2009: 22-23). Yet Gopher lacked what was called ‘hypertext’ so, in 1992, Veronica was placed on Gopher servers as a crawler to search ‘menu-structured directories’ (ibid).⁴³ Created in 1992, ViolaWWW stands for ‘Visually Interactive Object-Oriented Language and Application’ and was the first browser to add extended functionality such as embedded scriptable objects, stylesheets and tables. Eventually ViolaWWW lost out to another graphical browser called Mosaic that was released on April 22, 1993. Mosaic was a kind of central nervous system, which provided users with full-colour, graphic webpages and, more importantly, a visual understanding of networked webpages that were both fun and intuitive to surf (Calore 2010). This browser enabled not only geeks but also users from around the world to have access to the web and it was subsequently ported to Microsoft Windows, making it

popular. Traffic increased on the World Wide Web from around 500 known servers in 1993 to around 10000 in 1994 with Mosaic the predominant means for searching the web.

9.0 The rise of commercial enterprise: Web directories, meta search, portals