Back to the Beginning
Ward Cunningham came up with the concept for the wiki in 1994. Cunningham wanted to create a unique online site for programmers involved in a type of software development known as object-oriented programming, which allowed the user to drag and drop, and just click to make easy edits. The first website to be titled a wiki was Cunningham’s own WikiWikiWeb (wikiwikiweb.com),
originally described as “the simplest online database that could possibly work.” Cunningham gave the site this name upon recalling a Honolulu International Airport counter employee telling him to take the “Wiki-Wiki” shuttle bus in order to get from one airport terminal to another. Cunningham explained, “I chose wiki-wiki as an alliterative substitute for ‘quick,’ and thereby avoided naming this stuff quick-web.”
FIGURE 7.1 Wiki-Wiki Bus
Cunningham’s initial design concept for his website came from Apple’s HyperCard, an easy-to-use programming language that the education industry had widely adopted for the Macintosh computer in the late 1980s and early 1990s. HyperCard was a graphic metaphor of a stack of index cards that contained links to other cards.
On March 15, 2007, the word wiki entered the online Oxford English Dictionary.
As Apple phased out HyperCard from its software library, ...
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