to a web site: database, though a closed system (all of the data could be taken as a workable whole) bidirectional hyperlinks (in Wikipedia and MediaWiki, this is approximated by the What links here feature). This bidirectionality allows ideas, notes, etc. to link to each other without the author being aware of this. In a way, they (or, at least, their relationships) get a life of their own. direct editing of the server (like wikis and CMS/blogs) ease of compositing, particularly when it comes to hyperlinking. The World Wide Web was created to unify the different existing systems at CERN like ENQUIRE, the CERNDOC, VMS Notes and the USENET. Why ENQUIRE failed Berners-Lee came back to CERN in 1984 and intensively used his own system. He realized that most of the time coordinating the project was to keep information up to date. He recognized that a system similar to ENQUIRE was needed, "but accessible to everybody." There was a need that people be able to create cards independent of others and to link to other cards without updating the linked card. This idea is the big difference and the cornerstone to the World Wide Web. Berners-Lee didn't make ENQUIRE suitable for other persons to use the system successfully, and in other CERN divisions there were similar situations to the division he was in. Another problem was that external links, for example to existing databases, weren't allowed, and that the system wasn't powerful enough to handle enough connections to the database. Further development stopped because Berners-Lee gave the ENQUIRE disc to Robert Cailliau, who had been working under Brian Carpenter before he left CERN. Carpenter suspects that the disc was reused for other purposes since nobody was later available to do further work on ENQUIRE. Technical The application ran on terminal with plaintext 24x80. The first version was able to hyperlink between files. ENQUIRE was written in the Pascal programming language and implemented on a Norsk Data NORD-10 under SINTRAN III, and version 2 was later ported to MS-DOS and to VAX/VMS. See also Gopher (protocol) - another hypertext protocol History of the Internet History of the World Wide Web NLS (computer system) Project Xanadu References Further reading External links ENQUIRE Manual scanned images of the Enquire Manual from 1980 Tim Berners-Lee bio at Curiosity Research Content management systems Hypertext History of the Internet Wikipedia articles with ASCII art CERN software