3 Nov
2009
3 Nov
'09
12:04 p.m.
Mark Tapley wrote:
Catching up on my old magazine stack
yesterday, I came across
what looked like a good article in Physics Today (Nov. 1998, Vol. 51
No. 11) entitled "The World Wide Web and High-Energy Physics". It
described the steps leading to the evolution of HTTP, HTML, and the
adoption of those protocols at CERN and elsewhere. Nice photos of Tim
Berners-Lee sitting in front of a NeXTStep screen, and *the* Cube
that ran the original server.
The article appears to be on-line at:
http://www.physicstoday.org/archive.html
(click on 1998, select the Nov. issue with the icebreaker on
the cover, look in "articles". I have to admit though, my Safari
4.0.3 and Firefox 3.5.1, both on Mac OS 10.4.11, fail to display the
article .pdf they think they are serving.
Did anyone else note this article, and can comment on its accuracy?
Does anyone want/need more info?
I would read it if I could get it with any ease: the pdf link shows up but
takes one to a sign-in page rather than delivering up the pdf (I hate those
sign-up requirements for such things).
I had some involvement with the HEP-community/ CERN / networking issues /
protocol standards battles / blah blah blah in the mid-to-late-80s timeframe
(just before the WWW), so it would be curious to see what the article has to say.
A pithy one-sentence synopsis of the issue in the period: CERN and the European
community were attempting to stick with and mandate the use of ISO/CCITT
standard protocols (OSI) through the 1980s; the internet TCP/IP juggernaut and
other developments (such as their own HTTP) eventually overwhelmed the politics.