First web server of the Technical University of Berlin

History of the First Web Server of the Technical University of Berlin

The first steps in developing the World Wide Web (WWW) were conducted in the academic ivory tower - unnoticed by the public. In 1989 Tim Berners-Lee from CERN, a European research laboratory for particle physics, proposed the development of a "world wide web" in order to improve cooperation among physicists doing research in high energy physics at different places in the world. At the end of 1990, he had completed a demonstration system with a simple browser (only for texts). In the following year, the WWW software of CERN was released and made accessible in the Internet. In 1992 the first net of this new type was established among research institutions of high energy physics, among these was the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA.

The WWW project at the Chair of Knowledge Base Systems (WBS) started in 1992 as a students initiative. Within the framework of a local information service, users of the department of computer science of the TU Berlin got access to hypertexts (study and research guide, library index inter alia), from the beginning of 1993 also with the graphical Browser X Mosaic (then just completed by Marc Andreessen [NSCA], the later co-founder of Netscape).

At the beginning of November 1993, the first web server of the TU Berlin was installed on the WBS computer (Sun4/25) python.cs.tu-berlin.de, Port 2784, and registered by NSCA. In the same month the computer was given the alias name www.cs.tu-berlin.de. At that time existed 250 web server worldwide - according to statistics of Matthew Gray (MIT) (Reid [1997], Introduction, p. xxvi, Exhibit I.3). The WBS server played a leading role among the first web servers of Germany, because since March 1994 the web page for Germany could be worldwide accessed. This web page was registered in Portugal (for Europe) and in USA (for the world). However, in the same year this page was given to Munich, for the computer net of the TU Berlin was too slow serving as a WWW entry for Germany. - Meanwhile World Wide Web has changed considerably. While it started as a communication medium for exchanging scientific information, today it is dominated by industry and economy. In June 1993 the amount of commercial servers was 1.5 %, at the end of 1994 it was 20 %, and today it exceeds 90 %.

References:

Berners-Lee, Tim; Cailliau, Robert; Luotonen, Ari; Nielsen, Henrik F.; Secret, Arthur: The World Wide Web, Comm. ACM, 37 (8), 1994, 76-82.
Ford, Andrew; Dixon, Tim: Spinning the Web, Thomson Computer Press, 2nd Edition, London 1996.
Reid, Robert H.: Architects of the Web, Wiley, New York 1997.

Last change: November 7, 2014
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