[COFF] WWW proposal anniversary

[cym224 at gmail.com (Nemo Nusquam)]

On 11/11/19 19:03, Dave Horsfall wrote:
> On Mon, 11 Nov 2019, Nemo Nusquam wrote:
>
>> And my usual question (answered in Sir Tim's book): What box hosted 
>> the first webserver outside CERN (and what language was it written in)?
>
> I'd amend my notes accordingly if I knew the answer.

Apologies for my delay but as I read "Weaving the Web" over 10y ago,  I 
wanted to be accurate in my response.  (This meant finding the book in 
my library.)  So here are some relevant passages.

[p. 32, 1st para. et seq.]
Our first target, humble beginning that it was, would be the CERN 
telephone book.

The phone book existed as a database on CERN's aging mainframe.  [I 
recall a comment about hundreds of researchers logged into the mainframe 
for the sole purpose of looking up telephone numbers but I can't find it 
again.

[...]
I got my simple server to run on the mainframe, then chopped it in two, 
so that the essential HTTP-related Internet functions were done by mode 
code (written in C language) and Bernd was left to write the rest of the 
server in his favorite [sic] language, "REXX."

[p. 45, last para, cont. next page]
When Paul returned to SLAC he shared the Web with Louse Addis, the 
librarian who oversaw all the material produced by SLAC.  She saw it as 
godsend for their rather sophisticated but mainframe bound library 
system, and a way to make SLAC's substantial internal catalogue of 
online documents available to physicists worldwide. Louise persuaded a 
colleague who developed tools for her to write the appropriate
program, and Louise's management SLAC had the first Web server outside 
of CERN.

N.