Darpa and Arpa created the internet back in 68-69.
The WWW was created as a graphical interface to what was a very difficult system to use.
I remember the day in I think ‘93 when I saw the first web browser.
We were shocked at Intel and suddenly 3/4 the building was exploring the possibilities.
re: “The WWW was created as a graphical interface to what was a very difficult system to use.”
What was the name of that text based ‘crawler’ that could follow simple links back then (I think it was)?
The ‘browser’ at that point became a link/a combination of a text-based document viewer/reader and images (gifs etc.) then ....
Here’s what I was thinking of:
From: “Precursors”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_web_browser#Precursors
From 1987 ... TransText
Another early browser, Silversmith ...1987 ...
Starting in 1988, Peter Scott and Earle Fogel expanded the earlier HyperRez concept in creating Hytelnet which added jumps to telnet sites ... and which by 1990 offered users instant logon and access to the online catalogs of over 5000 libraries around the world. ...
There were lots of “hypertext” systems, that could have been the WWW, but only special people had access to the people who could make it happen. They took prior art/obvious technology, and put this guy’s name on it.
Even I had a networked hypertext system going — none of it was mine, I just put together the obvious parts. I think every computer science major was doing this.
“The WWW was created as a graphical interface to what was a very difficult system to use.”
I remember the first time I saw that. You clicked on a thing on the screen and it fetched something from the internet.
I, perhaps like you, consider the internet like the telephone network. It’s the machinery that gets data sent and received. Separately there’s the matter of how it’s used, the snooping, the censoring, the “social media” phenomenon ...