World Wide Web

In 1990 Tim Berners-Lee and CERN in Geneva implemented a hypertext system to provide efficient information access to the members of the international high-energy physics community. SLAC Physicist Paul Kunz brought word of the World Wide Web's existence to SLAC on his return from a meeting with Tim Berners-Lee at CERN. Later in 1992 the Internet Society was chartered and the World Wide Web, a system of servers and applications, was officially released by CERN to allow transfer of hypertext documents across the newly transformed Internet.

In February of 1993 a new browser called Mosaic was released by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA). It had many of the features of an earlier browser, MidasWWW and also had the support of a large organization. With the availability and widespread adoption of Mosaic, Web use started to gain momentum.

The SLAC Library acquired a NeXT computer and a 1.3 gigabyte disk to converting TeX DVI files to PostScript using the DVIPS program on UNIX. The files were then compressed and stored on a SLAC WWW server. Figures were quested by e-mail from authors, faxed to the NextFAX, converted to Encapsulated PostScript format and posted with the basic text on the SLAC PostScript server (preprint.slac.stanford.edu).

In 1993 Joan Winters installed the first "official" SLAC home page with links to web pages developed by others and by 1994 additional features were added to the SPRISE-HEP service through WWW. By now it was possible to see who cited any of the author's papers.

Ginsparg at the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), started to link to the SLAC PostScript server in order to supply .ps.Z files as well as the TeX source. Others start setting up shadow servers to have the PostScript versions closer at hand.

Scenes from Monmouth County, New Jersey

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