1991, the year when the first websites were published, is not by any stretch of the imagination the year when the internet started. But I think it's a good place to start when we try to understand what the internet is now. Someone who is familiar with the internet in 2020 can look back at 1991 and recognize some of the broad strokes. Once you understand the 1990s, it gets easier to go back if you want to, and trace the earlier events^[1]. It also gets easier to contextualize what has been happening in the decades since 2000, and understand the situation in which we find ourselves.

A thriving internet culture already existed in 1991. Usenet, a kind of bulletin-board-system, had been operating continuously since 1980. Usenet is a collection of channels called newsgroups--today we might think of them as similar to subreddits or topics in a discussion forum. But Usenet consists of a single namespace^[2]. The newsgroups were assigned names in a tree structure--for instance, there might be one newsgroup called baking, and a more specialized newsgroup might be called baking.sourdough, as a kind of branch, or subgroup. Up until 1987, the names were not officially standardized-- if you wanted a new newsgroup, you could choose any name that wasn't already taken. In 1987, there was an event called the Great Renaming, when the administrators of the most popular Usenet servers decided to impose some structure. They decided that there would be seven top-level-categories: comp (computing), misc, news, rec (recreation and entertainment), sci, soc (social content), and talk (basically, any discussion likely to devolve into a fight, like politics or religion). As a reaction to the great renaming^[3], a top-level category called alt was also formed, with the intention of being an alternative to the nominally-official categories. Starting in 1987, the name of every newsgroup started with one of those words. Usenet may have been the original source of some internet concepts we still use, such as trolling, SPAM, and FAQ.

What I'm trying to show is that the types of systems and human behaviors that we think of as "the internet" already existed prior to the website. It's the website that was new in 1991, and that's a curious thing. Usenet was an extremely successful system--it had lots of users who were sharing text and media files, just like people do today. But for some reason, when the website came along, it eventually relegated Usenet to second-class status. So why did that happen? If the subsequent massive expansion of the internet in the late 1990s suggests that there was a whole bunch of potential just waiting to be released, then where did it come from and what set it free?

We have to be very careful here. When we talk about computer history, from its beginnings almost to the present, one thing we need to remember is that computers were getting much better very quickly. So we need to be really careful about statements like "the philosophy that underlies {x technology} was faulty somehow, therefore more people started using {y technology}." Before we make any statement like that, we need to consider the idea that maybe the newer system happened to arrive at a time when it could take advantage of improvements in computer technology that established systems were prevented from using by their communities and functions. It's possible that the design principles on which one system was built could affect its adoption relative to a similar system, but we should not assume that relationship just because we see one system outcompete another^[4].

In any case, in 1991, Tim Berners-Lee, working in the High Energy Physics group at CERN, distributed a design for a new way to publish documents between computers called HyperText Transfer Protocol, or HTTP. His intention was for scientists to be able to record and share information easily, without it getting lost. As he later said in an interview:

Most of the technology involved in the web, like the hypertext, like the Internet, multifont text objects, had all been designed already. I just had to put them together. It was a step of generalizing, going to a higher level of abstraction, thinking about all the documentation systems out there as being possibly part of a larger imaginary documentation system. But then the engineering was fairly straightforward. It was designed in order to make it possible to get at documentation and in order to be able to get people — students working with me, contributing to the project, for example — to be able to come in and link in their ideas, so that we wouldn’t lose it all if we didn’t debrief them before they left. Really, it was designed to be a collaborative workspace for people to design on a system together.

He describes his project as a documentation system--a way for scientists to organize and share research notes and user manuals for the tools of high-energy physics. The document describing the original HTTP implementation weighs in at 656 words. What it contains is a protocol--a structured way for computers to interact so that they can understand each other. This protocol centers around two concepts: request and response. One computer, the client, sends a small piece of text called a request to another, the server. The server then builds a response and sends it back^[5].

There's something curious about the 1991 protocol document. It says that every request must begin with the word GET followed by the document address. We would now refer to this type of request as a GET request, and it's the type of request that a browser makes when it's trying to, well, get something, like a web page. There are other types of requests as well: a POST request is for when you want to make a new thing, like when you submit a tweet. a PUT request is often when you want to edit or change something that already exists, and a DELETE request is for deleting something. In 1991, none of these other types existed, and yet we can see that people planned for them, because even then, you had to specify GET.

So the HTTP protocol allowed a computer to send a request and get a response. This itself wasn't new--FTP, or File Transfer Protocol, had supported the equivalent of GET, POST, PUT, and DELETE requests since 1984. HTTP was different. First, it was more efficient for transferring small files like web pages. Second, and probably more importantly, it was designed to transfer hypertext. It's hard to understand hypertext as a concept because we live surrounded by it--basically, it's the idea that text can have links to other resources. Before hypertext, you could use FTP to download a file, but you needed to open the file on your computer with some program you already had, and any related documents might or might not be available to you. Hypertext lets you combine the program that downloads the information with the program that shows you the information, so that you can move from one document to another easily without losing context, and so each document can contain links to other available documents. The most common hypertext format on the internet is HyperText Markup Language, or HTML.

We can also see an important distinction between HTTP and Usenet, the bulletin board system, in the way they use namespaces. In Usenet, the namespace is the set of newsgroups--that is, a name refers to an ongoing conversation. HTTP uses the domain name system as its main namespace. A domain refers to the "place" where something "lives" on the internet. Where Usenet gives permanent names to discussions, HTTP treats permanent names as locations^[6].

When we look at each of these elements of HTTP, we can see both how it describes the version of the internet that we know today, and how its design choices and intentions differed from other systems of its time. HTTP allowed any domain name to be a location, or web site, where hypertext documents could be accessed by anyone with a web browser. Those documents could link to other documents on the same site or another site. It also made use of an existing convention of representing online "stuff" as resources-- things that it makes sense to GET, PUT, POST, or DELETE. One of the main goals of the effort was to allow large numbers of people to collaborate on complex tasks. It was this configuration of technologies, founded at CERN in 1991, that was named the World Wide Web.

There's a lot more ground to cover, but this is a good place to pause. In future posts in this series, we'll explore the evolution of HTTP through its subsequent versions, and some of the important design concepts that arose as it matured. Later, we'll think about how HTTP serves as the foundation for other developments in internet technology, and the principles on which those later systems are designed.