Today, Bebo White is a physicist and Departmental Associate Emeritus at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, but in 1990, he was helping define how computers would benefit particle physicists —and unbeknownst to him, how they would benefit the entire world.
Join us at AppStorey, as Bebo White tells how he found himself researching high-energy physics at Stanford, while on sabbatical at the Large Electron-Positron Collider at CERN. Bebo got involved with the newly emerging World Wide Web created using NeXT —Bebo became the “First American Webmaster”.
Picture this. It’s 1990 there is no web to surf. People purchase software at retail stores, and computers use floppy disks. Personal Computers are not yet a part of everyday life, they were not even a part of everyday practice within the scientific world of high-energy physics.
All of that was about to change, forever.
You might not know, but it was high-energy particle physics professionals who invented the world wide web. It was they who needed a more powerful computer like an astronomer needs a bigger telescope.
If there is someone computer scientists feel intellectually inadequate around, it would be high-energy particle physicists —especially those working at places like SLAC or CERN. The NeXT would impress in the domain of even the most advanced physics, but not always for the reasons computer scientists might expect.
Where did the web come from? Why is the web the way it is? Where are we going in the future?
These physicists helped invent the web, and the very first browsers which were all created using NeXT computers. It was these NeXT computers that vended the very first-ever web pages. These advanced computers literally ran all earliest web servers and web browsers alike. At that earliest time, Steve Jobs’ NeXT Cube was entirely black-and-white. That’s right, no color. No color of any sort was part of the very earliest web. Imagine that.
“People [Physicists at CERN] recognized they needed computing, but they didn’t want to DO computing.” Bebo tells AppStorey, regarding the inception of the earliest web.
It turns out that it was particle physicists who first cried ‘’eureka’’ upon seeing the web, not computer scientists. And these inventors had profound effects on the way the web source code was licensed and used commercially. The very reason behind the meteoric rise and adoption of the web, lies within this peculiar heritage. It was not until April 1993 CERN officially stated with clarity they would not have ownership of the web, it would remain freely in the public domain forever. https://home.cern/topics/birth-web
Pictured: The earliest web was created by Physicists using Steve Jobs’s NeXT Computer. From the left Paul Kunz, Tim Berners-Lee and Bebo White pose with Paul’s own vintage NeXT Computer.
Initially this revolutionary new NeXT computer was for folks in academia, just like these physics geeks. Beyond crunching numbers, this extraordinary NeXT Computer birthed tools and inventions that would change the world that we all live in, forever.
Speaking of the spectacularly advanced NeXT Computer, Bebo sums up the amazing science behind the exterior of this regal black cube:
“They took the ideas that Alan Kay, Doug Engelbart, Ivan Sutherland talked about, and put [NeXT] into a production machine, and enterprise machine.” Explains Bebo for AppStorey —“here was a machine that was not only beautiful, but was ahead of its time…[NeXT] had stratospheric capability but didn’t require the user to be that sophisticated”
Paul Kunz (pictured on the left) helped make later web browsers like NCSA Mosaic (considered the father of Netscape) which heralded the age of the modern web. Read all about the creation of this latter web browser and Paul’s class on the subject here:
It took the NeXT Computer platform produced by Steve Jobs for the world wide web to be possible, and it took particle physicists to invent it. Bebo was part of the team that established the first non-European Web site at SLAC (the fifth web site to be created in the world).
How was this NeXT computer different? It was far easier to use, and a software engineer could create high performance server software and even create beautiful and advanced user interfaces all on the very same device.
The NeXT was both a server, and a user’s personal workstation. The NeXT was first and last, of a lost generation of computers. NeXT was created at a primordial time when these two computing forces were still one.
“This machine is a server, DO NOT POWER DOWN!!” Says this note stuck to the back of Tim Berners-Lee’s original NeXT Cube. A black and white computer that was the first web server, and the first web browser, both.
The NeXT Computer was a rare, and largely extinct breed of computers referred to as a Workstation. These desktop computers acted as both a server and as a user’s personal computing device at the same time. The fact that the NeXT had advanced Object Oriented programming tools and a user-interface AppKit (grandfather of today’s UIKit for iOS) to assemble advanced applications quickly, was the power behind the NeXT and the inventions it produced.
Today’s mobile world is built upon the the web to transfer information and the App Store to protect digital rights online. Both of these software inventions were created entirely using NeXT Computers during the early 1990’s.
Read the Stanford University report looking back just one decade after the web’s creation:
Come with us along a journey into the history of the earliest web. The computing world of today still contains untold true stories. Stories of creation and invention that changed the world we live in, along with History’s Greatest Computer, a computer that made history more than it has been a part of it. Until now. AppStorey, The Interviews.