by Shahrooz Feizabadi
This chapter presents the history of the World Wide Web as well as the history of several ideas and underlying technologies from which the World Wide Web emerged. The history is presented in a sequential format, while events and technologies of particular significance have been discussed in individual sections. As the World Wide Web, in the most basic sense, is a networked hypertext information delivery mechanism, particular attention is given to the above mentioned fundamental technologies of hypertext and networking. More recently, with the advent of technologies such as Java, the web has gone through another transformation, which among other things, has provided the ability to deliver applications and distributed objects across the Internet. A section on evolution of Java has therefore been included to provide historical context for this relatively new technology.
Shahrooz Feizabadi <shahrooz@vt.edu>