A Brief(ish) History of the Web Universe - Part I: The Pre-Web

Markup

In 1969, in this early world of incompatibility, three men at IBM (Goldfarb, Mosher and Lorie) worked on the idea of using markup documents to allow machines to trade and deal with a simple understanding of "documents" upon which they could specialize understanding, storage, retrieval or processing. It was called GML after their initials, but later "Generalized Markup Language". It wasn't especially efficient. It had nothing to do with HyperAnything nor even EDI in a technical sense. But it was comparatively easy to get enough rough agreement in order and flexible enough to make things actually work in order to achieve real things. For example, you could send a GML document to a printer and define separately how precisely it would print. Here's what it looked like:

:h1.Chapter 1:  Introduction
   :p.GML supported hierarchical containers, such as
   :ol
   :li.Ordered lists (like this one),
   :li.Unordered lists, and
   :li.Definition lists
   :eol.
   as well as simple structures.
   :p.Markup minimization (later generalized and formalized in SGML),
   allowed the end-tags to be omitted for the "h1" and "p" elements.

But GML was actually a script - the tags indicated macros which could be implemented differently. Over time, GML would inspire a lot, get pretty complicated, philosophical about declarative nature and eventually become SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language). This would continue growing in popularity - especially in the print industry.

The changing landscape

For the next decade, computers got faster, cheaper, and smaller and more popular in business, science and academia and these all matured and evolved on their own.

Networks were arising too and the need for standardization there seemed obvious. For about 10 years there was an attempt to create a standard network stack in international committees, but it was cumbersome, complex and not really getting there. Then, late in this process, Vint Cerf left the committee. He led work focused on rough consensus and running code for the protocol and, in very short order, the basic Internet was born.

Around this same time, a hypertext system based on Nelson's ideas, called "Guide" was created at Carnegie Mellon University for Unix workstations.

Return of the HyperStuff

Guide was commercially sold by, ported by to the Mac and PC by, and later very much improved on by a company called OWL (Office Workstations Limited) led by a man named Ian Ritchie. It introduced one of the first real hypertext systems to desktops in 1985. In 1986 Guide won a British Computer Society award. Remember "Guide" and "Ian Ritchie" because they're going to come back up.

Another two years later people were really starting to take notice of "HyperText" (and beginning to get a little over-generalized with the term - frequently this was really becoming "HyperMedia"). In 1987, an application called "HyperCard" was introduced and the authors convinced Apple to give it away free for all Mac users. It was kind of a game changer.

HyperCard was a lot like Guide in many ways but with a few important details we'll come back to. The world of HyperCards was built of "decks" - each deck a stack of "cards" full of GUI: forms, animations, information and interactions which could be linked together and scripted to do all sorts of useful things. Cards had an innate "order" and could link to and play other media which would - the state of things in a card/deck was achieved through scripting. They were bitmap based in presentation and cleverly scalable.

Screenshot of VideoWorks and the "score"

That same year, in 1987, a product called VideoWorks by a company named Macromind was released. In fact, if you got a Mac, you saw it because it was used to create the interactive guided tour that shipped with it. You could purchase it for your own authorship.

One interesting aspect of VideoWorks was its emphasis on time. Time is kind of an important quality of non-static media, so if you're interested in the superset of hypermedia, you need the concept of time. Thus, the makers of VideoWorks included a timeline upon which things were 'scored'. With this HyperMedia, authors could allow a user to move back and forth in the score at will. This was kind of slick, it made sense to a lot of people and it caught on. Their product later became "Director" and it became a staple for producing high-end, wow'ing multimedia content on the desktop, CD-ROMs for kiosks and so on.

By the late 1980's, OWL's Guide had really come to focus on the PC version. Hypercard was Free on the Mac and as it's creator Ian Ritchie would say later...

You can compete on a lot of things, but it's hard to compete with free...

The Stage is Set...

The Internet was there. It was available - in use even, but it was pretty basic and kind of cumbersome. Many people who used the internet perhaps didn't even realize what the internet really was - they were doing so through an online service like Compuserve or Prodigy.

But once again, as new doors were opened, some saw new promise.

Web Conception

This is the world into which HTML was conceived. I say conceived rather than "born" or "built" because Tim had been working out his idea for a few years and refining it. He talked about it to anyone who would listen about a global, decentralized, read-write system that would really change the Internet. He had worked out the idea of an identifier, a markup language and a protocol but that was about it.

And here's the really interesting bit: He didn't really want to develop it, he wanted someone else to. As Tim has explained it several times...

There were several commercial hypertext editors and I thought we could just add some internet code, so that the hypertext documents could then be sent over the internet. I thought the companies engaged in the then fringe field of hypertext would immediately grasp the possibilities of the web.

Screenshot of OWL's Guide in 1990

Remember OWL and Guide? Tim thought they would be the perfect vehicle, they were his first choice. So, in November 1990, when Ian Ritchie took to a trade show in Versaille to show off Guide's HyperMedia, Tim approached him and tried hard to convince him to make OWL the browser of the Web. However, as Tim notes "Unfortunately, their reaction was quite the opposite..."

Note that nearly all of the applications discussed thus far, including OWL, were commercial endeavors. In 1986, authors who wanted to use OWL to publish bought a license for about $500 and then viewers licensed readers for about $100. To keep this in perspective, in adjusted dollars this is roughly $1,063 for writers and $204 for readers. This is just how software was done, but it's kind of different from the open source ethos of the Internet. A lot of people initially assumed that making browsers would be a profitable endeavor. In fact, later Mark Andreeson would make a fortune on the name Netscape in part because there was an assumption that people would buy it. It was, after all, a killer app.

It's pretty interesting to imagine where we would be now if Ritchie had been able to see it. What would it have been like with OWL's capabilities as a starting point, and what impact the commercial nature of the product might have had on the Web's history and ability to catch on. Hard to say.

However, with this rejection (and other's like it) , Tim realized

...it seemed that explaining the vision of the web was exceedingly difficult without a web browser in hand, people had to be able to grasp the web in full, which meant imagining a whole world populated with websites and browsers. It was a lot to ask.

He was going to have to build something in order to convince people. Indeed, Ian Ritchie would later give a Ted Talk about this in which he admits that two years later when he saw Mosaic he realized "yep, that's it" - he'd missed it.

A Final Sidebar...

PenPoint Tablet in 1991

At very nearly the same time something that was neither HyperStuff nor SGML nor Internet related entered the picture. It was called "PenPoint". Chances are pretty good that you've never heard of it and it's probably going to be hard to see how, but it will play importantly into the story later. PenPoint was, in 1991, a tablet computer with a stylus and gesture support and vector graphics.

Think about what you just read for a a moment and let it sink in.

If you've never seen PenPoint, you should check out this video from 1991 because it's kind of amazing. And here's what it has to do with our story: It failed. It was awesomely ahead of its time and it just... failed. But not before an application was developed for it called "SmartSketch FutureSplash" (remember the name) - a vector based drawing tool which would have been kind of sweet for that device in 1991.

I explain in Part II: Time how this plays very importantly into the story.