rge and diverse compendia of information could be searched, accessed, and reviewed freely, using a standard user interface based on an open, plat- form-independent design. This paper relied heavily on Berners-Lee's ear- lier paper. In WorldWide Web: A Proposal for a HyperText Project, Berners-Lee and Cailliau proposed the creation of a "world wide web" of information that would allow the various CERN entities to access the information they need based on a common and universal set of protocols, file exchange formats, and keyword indices. The system would also serve as a central (although architecturally distributed) repository of information and would be totally platform independent. Furthermore, the software would be available to all and distributed free of charge. Once the paper had been circulated for a time, the development of what we know today as the World Wide Web occurred with remarkable speed. The first "system" was developed on a NeXT platform. The first general release of the WWW inside CERN occurred in May of 1991, and in December the world was notified of the existence of the World Wide Web (known then as W3) thanks to an article in the CERN computer newsletter. Over the course of the next few months, browsers began to emerge. Erwise, a GUI client, was announced in Finland, and Viola was released in 1992 by Pei Wei of O'Reilly & Associates. The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) joined the W3 consortium, but didn't announce their Mosaic browser until February of 1993. Throughout all of this development activity, W3 servers, based on the newly released Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) that allowed diverse 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 sites to exchange information, continued to proliferate. By January of 1993, there were 50 known HTTP servers; by October there we