There was a problem at CERN--when a new scientist joined she or he would request the computer files of previous work by departed scientists, but often the information was in a format intended for a different type of computer. Tim Berners-Lee came up with the idea of preparing files in a very simple format that could be read by a browser on any type of computer. He included hypertext markup in this new "language", HTML, and thus started the internet revolution.
In 1993, the Mosaic browser was released. This was followed shortly later by Netscape 2.0, with new tags that gave the webpage builder more control over webpage formatting. Inclusion of pictures was possible (and easy). Back then, having a photograph on a page made it look spectacular.
Polymer Chemistry Hypertext was built following the style of the time, with fancy backgrounds were used, which later we would see as more problemmatic than artistic. Content and Style were intermixed, as the web page building predated XHTML and XML.
I was a graduate student at the University of Missouri-Rolla at the time. We had a very good computer science department, and I was friends with several students there who explained to me the huge impact that the internet would have on the future. I applied for a Unix account, and began web page building. It helped that the browser would let the viewer see the source code of the page any time we found something new.
A few months later I enrolled in the Physical Polymer Chemistry class. For the homework,we needed to go find the different equations, and then to confirm what each variable represented. We needed to work from various textbooks, and a big part of the problem with the homework was not knowing which textbook author would provide the information needed to answer a homework problem. A student could spend an hour reading through a chapter and find that the answer wasn't there.
Polymer Chemistry Hypertext was developed in response to the question: What if all of this work was given to the next class--instead of it becoming lost at the end of the semester? Knowing which authors covered a topic, and on what page, would reduce "hunting" time and provide more time for learning.
I noticed in early 2006 that Wikipedia seemed to have in many ways captured the spirit of the early internet idealists.
Work is now in progress to go back through the the lists of ideas (e.g. concepts, math, etc.) and to link them to Wikipedia. The new pages will replace the ornate backgrounds of the originals with a simple white, along with other improvements to content and design.
