I went to my preferred WWW search-engine (www.altavista.digital.com) and
searched for "Tim Berners-Lee". Two of the first page of ten of about
4000 hits called him the inventor of the World Wide Web. As I understand
it, the predecessor to HTML was SGML, Standard Generalized Markup
Language. I am guessing that he invented such a language; one of the
sites mentioned that he saw that particle physics needed something like
this, and we had already created one such system, although unfamiliar
with the term hypertext. The idea of SGML was to have academic papers
available on a server, and have the references in the paper be links to
those other referenced works, an idea that I find fascinating. This
meant that it was desirable for various research centers to publish
their works in the same way, and to be able to move to any work, any
where, just by using these links. Wirt Atmar can probably shed much more
light on the academic efforts and use than I can as a mere enthusiast. I
understand that CERN, where Tim Berners-Lee was when he started this
work, is no longer 'on the web'.

>----------
>From:  Jim Phillips[SMTP:[log in to unmask]]
>Sent:  Tuesday, July 08, 1997 1:16 PM
>To:    [log in to unmask]
>Subject:       [HP3000-L] Inventor of WWW?
>
><snip>  Can anyone tell me exactly what it
>is that Berners-Lee invented?  I've never thought of the WWW as being
>something that any one person can be credited with inventing, so please
>feel free to educate me.
<snip>