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On 1993, in front of a computer terminal at Honolulu Community
College, Kevin Hughes helped to create the World Wide Web.
Hughes, a student and later a student worker at the college, pioneered the use of many Web designs that we take for granted today when he put together the first Hawaii Web site, a campus-wide information system for HCC.
"My estimation of Kevin's importance is based on the fact that out of the 100 or so key pioneers of the Web to '95 from its inventor (Tim BernersLee) on down whom I've interviewed for the project, virtually all have said they consider the Hawaii site to have been a big deal and an eyeopener to the Web's possibilities at the time," says Marc Webber, who is currently writing a history of the World Wide Web.
Suffice it to say Hughes was one of six people in the world inducted into the 1994 World Wide Web Hall of Fame (http://botw.org/1994/awards/fame.html).
Among the other inductees that year: Berners-Lee the "Father of the Web;" Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina, creators of the Mosaic browser and later Netscape Navigator; and, Lou Montulli, who invented Lynx. Hughes was recognized for developing a graphical interface, the precursor to the clickable imagemap.
The blurb about him reads: "As the Web administrator at HCC, he pioneered many concepts on the Web we now take for granted, such as interactive graphics, campus information on the Web and virtual museums. Also designed most of those filetype icons that are built into the clients and servers now.
"That's about as good as it gets; kind of like being chosen as an Apostle by the original Christians," opines Webber.
How did all this high tech creativity bubble forth at the Kalihi campus of all places? Well, once upon a time in 1993 there was a director for Information Technology at Honolulu Community College named Ken Hensarling. He wanted a campuswide information network that could be accessed by students and faculty from any type of computing platform. He wrote the first draft of the program for the network.
"At that time there was a student going to school there named Kevin Hughes who came to my attention because he hacked into our campus network," remembers Hensarling, "He...