Since exploding into the national consciousness in the mid-90’s, the media focus has been on what the Web can do. Descriptions of the Web in the media have ranged from the solution for all that is wrong with education to the symptom of all that is wrong with society.

The Web is described in many different ways:

• The world’s largest shopping mall: Web commerce is growing exponentially and is expected to reach $300 Billion in sales by the year 2002.
• A source of up-to-the-minute news: You can find late-breaking, in-depth news on the Web as networks like CNN and MSNBC expand their interactive news websites.
• A source of computer software: You can download thousands of freeware, shareware, trial software applications as well as purchase full versions of many software packages on the web.
• A communications medium: Web chat, newsgroups, web discussion boards, interactive video and audio are all consuming vast quantities of internet bandwidth these days.
• The Information Superhighway: It is this aspect of the Web that has generated the most interest among educators. The Web does offer phenomenal resources to users. With the number of webpages now well past the 1 Billion mark (Summer, 2000), information on nearly every topic imaginable does exist somewhere on the Web.

While all the other aspects of the Web are of value to educators, it is the access to distributed information that makes the Web so useful to educators. Interestingly, the notion of easy world-wide access to documents stored on distant machines was not a new one.

It was first proposed by Vannevar Bush in an article in Atlantic Monthly in 1945. At that time, nothing even remotely like the Internet existed and the article sounded like something out of a Jules Verne novel.

Ted Nelson expanded the concept in a system he called Xanadu in the late 60’s and early 70’s and even coined the term "hypertext" to describe the method of linking distributed documents stored on networked computers. But, the computers and networks of the day just hadn’t evolved to the point where the system would work.

It wasn’t until the late 1980’s and early 1990’s that readily accessible networks were in place that would allow users to actually utilize the concepts proposed by Bush and Nelson.

In 1989, Tim Berners-Lee, at the time working for CERN, a research institution in Switzerland, proposed the creation of a "World Wide Web" of computers connected by the Internet. The use of a simple universal computer language call HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) would allow these computers to use HTTP (HyperText Transfer Protocol) to transfer documents and images directly from a host computer to the client computer in graphic form.

In February of 1993, a group of young computer science students working at the National Center for Supercomputer Applications at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, released Mosaic, the first web browser to use a graphic user interface (GUI). Mosaic incorporated helper applications that made it possible to seamlessly access both text and images right in the browser window. Using the World Wide Web proposed by Tim Berners-Lee became a simple matter of "point and click". The easy access to distributed documents envisioned by Vannevar Bush and Ted Nelson became reality.

Netscape, the commercial spin-off of Mosaic was released to the public as "freeware" in early 1995. The Web rapidly expanded beyond the academic community and exploded on the national consciousness in the summer of 1995 with a media blitz unparalleled in recent years.

The Internet and the World Wide Web are deploying faster than any other new technology in history. The estimated number of active users has grown from 3 million in 1994 to over 130 million (Summer, 2000). Total internet traffic is doubling every 100 days. The information technology industry is growing twice as fast as the overall economy. - source: "Internet Use Explodes Around the World" - Ted Bridis, Associated Press, Fresno Bee, April 16, 1998

Spend some time exploring the Distributed Documents links on the next webpage. You will find links to:

• a digital version of Vannevar Bush’s original July, 1945 Atlantic Monthly article located on a computer at Simon Fraser University in British Colombia, Canada
• a June, 1995 article on Ted Nelson’s Xanadu project located at the Wired magazine website in San Francisco, CA
• an article discussing "The Wonders of Hypertext" from the PBS EdWeb websites located in California, North Carolina or Hong Kong
• A May, 1996 article titled "Seek and Ye Shall Find (Maybe)" also from Wired magazine’s website in San Francisco, CA
• A May, 1996 article titled "Navigating the Galaxies" from the Atlantic Monthly website in Boston, MA

It will become obvious as you explore these articles that you are seeing Bush and Nelson’s dreams of distributed documents in action. The websites exist in remote locations somewhere out there on the Web. The hypertext links on the course website instantly link your computer to the distant computer and return the documents to your computer...

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