Passage 53
学霸导读 今天让我们来一起了解一下万维网的发展历史吧！
Want to see how much the world has changed in just the past few decades? Log on to the Internet, launch a search engine and type in the word to enquire. You’ll get about 30,000 hits. It turns out you can “enquire” about nearly anything online these days, from used touring bikes for sale in Sydney to teddy bears in New York.
But scroll down （ 下拉 ） the list far e 1 ， and you’ll f ind this hidden secret of cyberspace： “Enquire Within Upon Everything”—a handy （ 易用的 ） little computer program written nearly 40 years ago by a software consultant （ 顾问 ） named Tim Berners-Lee. Who knew this modest British computer scientist would later create the World Wide Web which would forever change the shape of modern life by a 2 the way people do business， entertain and inform themselves， and build communities and exchange ideas.
Unlike so many of the inventions that have moved the world, World Wide Web truly was the work of one man. Thomas Edison got credit for the light bulb, but he had dozens of people in his lab working on it. But the World Wide Web is Berners-Lee’s a 3 . He designed it, and more than anyone else, has fought to keep it open and free.
It started， of all places， in the Swiss Alps. The year was 1980. Berners-Lee， working as a software engineer at CERN （ 欧洲核子研究组织 ） in Geneva， devised a piece of software that could， as he put it， keep “track of all the random associations that one comes across in real life and that brains are s 4 to be so good at remembering but sometimes mine wouldn’t.” He called it Enquire， short for Enquire Within Upon Everything.
In Berners-Lee’s scheme （ 计划 ）， there would be no central manager， no central database and no scaling problems （ 伸缩性问题 ）. The thing could g 5 like the Internet itself， open-ended and inf inite. “One had to be able to jump，” he later wrote， “from software documentation to a list of people to a phone book to an organizational chart to whatever.”
So Berners-Lee produced a relatively easy-to-learn coding system—HTML （ 超文本标记语言 ） —that has come to be the c 6 language of the Web. It’s the way Web-content creators put those little colored， underlined links in their text， add images and so on. He designed a scheme that gave each Web page a unique location， or URL （ 统一资源定位符 ）. And he put f 7 a set of rules that permitted these documents to be linked together on computers across the Internet. He called that set of rules HTTP （ 超文本传输协议 ）.
In 1991 the World Wide Web debuted, and thereafter, what used to be chaotic in cyberspace began to be orderly and c 8 . From that moment on, the Web and the Internet grew as one. Within f ive years, the number of Internet users had j 9 from 600,000 to 40 million.
It’s hard to overstate the impact of the global system Berners-Lee created. He took a powerful communication system that only the elite （ 精英 ） could use and t 10 it into a mass market medium. “If this were a traditional science， Berners-Lee would win a Nobel Prize，” said Eric Schmidt， CEO of Novell， the world’s leading networking software provider.
1.__________2.__________3.__________4.__________5.__________
6.__________7.__________8.__________9.__________10.__________
高频词汇
permit /pə'mɪt/ v. 允许，准许
powerful /'paʊəf l/ adj. 强大的