LA INTERNET COMO TELARAÑA: EL WORLD-WIDE WEB

Abstract

At the end of the Eighties thousands of local area networks had turned the Internet the greater data store than never it had existed, but also in most chaotic. The possibilities were enormous, but the difficulties were frustrating: incompatible formats, different programs, heterogenous protocols, etc. One prevailed because the necessity to simplify the access to this volume of information, to make it simpler and homogenous. Wais, developed as of 1989 by a group of companies only fue a partial solution: the data had to be indexed with the new software and to be distributed by means of a new protocol, that is to say, it was necessary to make a work of adaptation of the already existing thing to the new system. The Gopher of the University of Minnesota, widely spread from 1991, contributed something more: by means of a simple system of windows (or menus) it is acceded to all type of text files, images, data bases, etc., without having to worry about his physical location in the network, the format or protocolo of recovery: FTP and wais, for example, are protocols that the gopher handles from the beginning, in addition to the his own one. An interface unified for the access to distributed information: this it has been the objective of the gopher, and also the one of the Web. The World-Wide project Web of the CERN has come to suppose another return of nut in the attempt to indeed put within reach of the users the virtual space of knowledge that is the Internet.