Hypertext

  1. Ted Nelson
  2. HES
  3. ENQUIRE
  4. Literary Machines
  5. Hyper
    Card

Networks

  1. Dial F For Frankenstein
  2. ARPANET
  3. Internet Protocol
  4. Usenet

Formats

  1. GML
  2. man
  3. EDS
  4. SGML

Computing

  1. NLS
  2. Xerox Alto
  3. Smalltalk
  4. Mac
  5. NeXT
Information Management: A Proposal

Browsers

  1. WWW
  2. LMB
  3. Mosaic
  4. Netscape
  5. IE
  6. Firefox
  7. Safari
  8. Chrome

Servers

  1. HTTP
  2. HTTPS
  3. Apache
  4. HTTP/1.1
  5. HTTP/2

Formats

  1. HTML
  2. HTML 2.0
  3. HTML 3.2
  4. HTML 4.01
  5. HTML5

Websites

  1. Amazon
  2. Google
  3. Napster
  4. Wikipedia
  5. Myspace
  6. YouTube

Background

March 2019 marks the 30th anniversary of the original proposal that would become the World Wide Web. A lot has happened in those thirty years. HTML has grown. HTTP has evolved. Browsers have changed.

What about the thirty years before that? Tim Berners-Lee was influenced by ideas on hypertext. The World Wide Web couldn’t exist without the internet. And computers needed to be powerful enough, usable enough, and affordable enough to make a global collaborative information space a reality.

This visualisation takes March 1989 as its centre point. Advances in hypertext, networks, computing, and formats are fired into Information Management: A Proposal. An explosion of browsers, formats, servers, and websites shoots out the other side. The result is something that looks a bit like particles colliding.

Particle collision at CERN