*The Integrated Newsroom - Literature Review*

2.2 Modern-day Internet

In 1945, Vannevar Bush envisaged a machine which allowed human knowledge to be accessed or searched in an associative manner. He conceived what he termed the 'memex', a microfilm/audio recording device which would allow 'selection by association rather than by indexing':

[The memex] affords an immediate step, however, to associate indexing, the basic idea of which is a provision whereby any item may be caused at will to select immediately and automatically to another. This is the essential feature of the memex. The process of tying two items together is the important thingÉ. When the user is building a trail, he names it, inserts the name in his code book, and taps it out on his key board. É It is exactly as though the physical items had been gathered together to form a new book. It is more than this, for any item can be joined into numerous trails.

(Bush 1945 cited in Winston 1998, p.322 - 323)

Though the computer was not invented until later, Bush's Atlantic Monthly article clearly set the direction for the conceptualisation of data arranged as a web rather than the branchings of a tree which computing power would most easily enable. Based on Bush's 'web' concept, Ted Nelson (Fidler 1997, p.43) coined the term 'hypertext' defined as a form of text which includes visible links to other pages of text or media, accessible by clicking or selecting the links. This language called Hypertext Mark-Up Language or HTML has become the basis for browsing on the WWW.

In 1969, the US Department of Defence commissioned the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) and four host computers were connected to form the preliminary ARPANET, the groundwork for the Internet. By 1973, the first international connections to the ARPANET were established from the University College of London (England) and Royal Radar Establishment (Norway) and began expanding very quickly. Two significant developments between 1989 and 1994 - Mosaic and the WWW - were probably the most important factors that contributed to the mainstream popularity of the Internet. These

technologies made the Internet user-friendly and accessible to the masses. In 1992, a small group of software developers and students led by Marc Andreessen at University of Illinois's National Centre for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) developed a dynamic graphical user interface (GUI) to facilitate the browsing of certain Internet databases.

The WWW, an international string of computer databases connected by the Internet, uses an information-retrieval architecture developed in 1989 by British computer specialist Tim Berners-Lee, at CERN's Geneva physics laboratory. His system relies on hypertext or hypermedia, the standard on which Mosaic is based. This simplified the management and display of mixed media and was the pre-cursor to online publishing as we know it today. Andreessen, later went on to co-found Netscape Communications whose browser Netscape Navigator became the de facto standard WWW browser (Fidler 1997, p.103 - 104).