ENQUIRE
| Invented by | Tim Berners-Lee |
|---|---|
| Launch year | 1980 |
| Company | CERN |
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.
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.
ENQUIRE was similar to Apple's HyperCard which also lacked clickable text and was not "hypertext", but ENQUIRE lacked an image rendering system. The advantage was that it was portable and ran on different systems.
ENQUIRE had pages called cards and hyperlinks within the cards. The links had different meanings and about a dozen relationships which were displayed to the creator, things, documents and groups described by the card. The relationship between the links could be seen by everybody explaining what the need of the link was or what happen if a card was removed. Everybody was allowed to add new cards but they always needed an existing card.
ENQUIRE was closer to a modern than to a web site:
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