This service is probably the one of greatest interest to business (i.e. non-academic and non-library) users. To try out WAIS, telnet think.com and log in as SWAIS.
<Section 18.3> World Wide Web (WWW or W3)
The newest of the three services is the World Wide Web. It was created at the European European Center for High Energy Physics (CERN). It is based on yet another technology (besides FTP and client-server)— hypertext. The World Wide Web views the entire complex of FTP sites as a single "document" with cross-references.
A WWW server lets you read that document and jump to any cross-reference that you find—hence the term "hypertext". The result is rather like a menu driven system but (at least in the graphical interface versions) you stay inside the familiar context of a text editor. If you can imagine clicking on a cross-reference and having your text editor fetch the document from an FTP site you will get the idea.
The documents that can be viewed by WWW are ASCII text with special "tags" that give a addresses of the "hypertext links." The tags use the syntax of the Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML). SGML is a language used by scholars to mark text for academic research. The WWW vision of the library of the future is a collection of documents spread all over the world, the whole of which can be looked at starting from any one of them. Sort of like having the whole world on your desktop.
There is not "top" node to the Web, but you can find points of entry at:
telnet info.cern.ch (European Center for High Energy Physics in Geneva, Switzerland, the "home" of WWW).
<Section 18.4> Summary of Navigation Tools
To summarize, here are the three systems discussed, together with their underlying technology and "constituency":
Gopher : Simple FTP and Telnet : Campus Info