 ten minutes. According to the Network Wizards' Internet Domain Survey at www.nw.com, it connects approximately 300 million host computers, provides services to approximately 800 million users, and comprises roughly two million interconnected networks worldwide. The World Wide Web The World Wide Web (WWW) was first conceived by Tim Berners-Lee, who is considered the father of the World Wide Web. A physicist by training, Berners-Lee began his career in the computer and telecommunications Downloaded from Digital Engineering Library @ McGraw-Hill (www.digitalengineeringlibrary.com) Copyright © 2004 The McGraw-Hill Companies. All rights reserved. Any use is subject to the Terms of Use as given at the website. First Things First Chapter 1 industries following graduation from Oxford, before accepting a consult- ing position as a software engineer with the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) during the late 1970s. During his stint in Geneva, Berners-Lee observed that CERN suffers from the problems that plague most major organizations: information location, management, and retrieval. CERN is a research organization with large numbers of simultaneous ongoing projects, a plethora of inter- nally published documentation, and significant turnover of people. Much of the work conducted at CERN revolves around large-scale high-energy physics collaborations that demand instantaneous information sharing between physicists all over the world. Berners-Lee found that his ability to quickly locate and retrieve specific information was seriously impaired by the lack of a single common search capability and the necessarily dis- persed nature of the organization. To satisfy this need, he collaborated with Robert Cailliau to write the first WWW client, a search and archive program that they called Enquire. Enquire was never published as a prod- uct, although Berners-Lee, Cailliau, and the CERN staff used it exten- sively. It did, however, prove to be the foundation for the World Wide Web. In May of 1990, Berners-Lee publish