From: chavey@jalapeno.cs.wisc.edu (Darrah Chavey)
Subject: Re: What is WWW?
Organization: Beloit College, Beloit, Wisc.
Date: Fri, 28 Aug 1992 17:05:33 GMT

In article <1992Aug28.111829.20856@fel.tno.nl> qb7g6@fel.tno.nl (Maarten Landzaat) writes:
>In a review of book by some Internet guru (sorry, I forgot his name),

probably Peter Deutsch

>an internet service "WWW" (World Wide Web I believe) was mentioned. ...
>I would very much like to know how to contact this WWW. Can anybody
>enlighten me?
>
>Maarten J. Landzaat (analyst/programmer, bass player, Atari/midi freak)

I'm not an expert, but the following is my description from a manual I'm
trying toput together for my college:

World Wide Web (WWW or W3)
%Description 
(FROM Resource Discovery in an Internet Environment, by Peter Deutsch):
	The World Wide Web project is a distributed information access
service based upon the hypertext model of information representation. In the
hypertext model, information is represented as a collection of hypertext
documents, which consist of conventional text augmented by hypertext links,
which are pointer references to other hypertext documents. These documents
can be distributed across the Internet. 
	The WWW architecture consists of three principle components,
including hypertext servers, a variety of graphics-based client programs,
and a set of information gateways to additional resource providers. The WWW
system also provides a common naming scheme for referring to all documents
in the system, a common network access protocol, and a common set of data
formats for representing information.
	In WWW the information servers provide access to three kinds of
hypertext documents. Real hypertext documents exist as files and can be
accessed using the WWW system directly. Index documents are actually gateway
programs for accessing search engines or other information providers. These
return either real hypertext documents or virtual documents, which are
created on the fly in response to a query to an Index. Real documents
consist of any collection of text and hypertext links, while virtual
documents created as the result of queries to index gateways contain a
collection of links to documents satisfying the user query.
	WWW is a system that is capable of [locating and accessing a wide
variety of information] in a user-accessible system, but users of WWW
sometimes have difficulty in locating specific information and keeping track
of where they are in the web of hypertext documents over time. This problem,
the so called "hypertext navigation problem" is a common one for hypertext
systems developed to date.
	Additional documentation on the World Wide Web is available by
anonymous ftp from:
	info.cern.ch: pub/WWW/doc

%Trial Clients 
	You can experiment with WWW by telneting to info.cern.ch, with a
user name of "www" and using your email address as your password.

%Building Your Own Client 
	Pre-compiled WWW clients are available for the following machines:
NeXT, apollo, decstation, pc-nfs, rs6000, sgi, snake, sun4, vax_ultrix, and
vms. These can be ftp'd from:
	info.cern.ch: pub/WWW/bin/XXX/www
where "XXX" is the name of the machine.
	Source code for a generic Unix server (using terminal type
interface) can be ftp'd from:
	info.cern.ch: pub/WWW/src/WWWLineMode_v.vv.tar.Z
	info.cern.ch: pub/WWWLineModeDefaults.tar.Z
The later version is a simple version with some stuff omitted. In the
former, "v.vv" refers to the version number.

%Building Your Own Server 
	WEB editors, for constructing new WEB data, are available only for
NeXT machines.  These can be downloaded from info.cern.ch. Otherwise, your
best bet is to use one of the clients above and use the hooks that WWW
provides into such other services as WAIS, the VMS help documents, etc.


=========================

I hope that helps. If other net experts can add, or correct errors on my
part, please do.  (Thanks to Peter Deutsch for his work on describing 
these services.)

-- 
--Darrah Chavey                  Department of Math & Computer Science
  chavey@beloit.edu              Beloit College, Beloit, Wisc.
Newsgroups: alt.internet.services