ENQUIRE creator Tim Berners-Lee
ENQUIRE was a  software project written in 1980 by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN, which was the predecessor to the World Wide Web. It was a simple hypertext program that had some of the same ideas as the Web and the Semantic Web but was different in several important ways.
According to Berners-Lee, the name was inspired by the title of an old how-to book, Enquire Within Upon Everything.The conditions
Around 1980, approximately 10,000 people were working at CERN with different hardware, software and individual requirements. Much work was done by email and file exchange. The scientists needed to keep track of different things and different projects became involved with each other. Berners-Lee started to work for 6 months on 23 June 1980 at CERN while he developed ENQUIRE. The requirements for setting up a new system were compatibility with different networks, disk formats, data formats, and character encoding schemes, which made any attempt to transfer information between dissimilar systems a daunting and generally impractical task. The different hypertext-systems before ENQUIRE were not passing these requirements i.e. Memex and NLS.
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