Ward Cunningham Establishes the First Wiki

On March 25, 1995 Ward Cunningham of Portland, Oregon, established the first wiki—the WikiWikiWeb on the c2.com domain for Cunningham & Cunningham, Inc. Wiki "was named by Cunningham, who remembered a Honolulu International Airport counter employee telling him to take the 'Wiki Wiki' shuttle bus that runs between the airport's terminals. According to Cunningham, 'I chose wiki-wiki as an alliterative substitute for 'quick' and thereby avoided naming this stuff quick-web.' Cunningham was in part inspired by Apple's HyperCard. Apple had designed a system allowing users to create virtual 'card stacks' supporting links among the various cards. Cunningham developed Vannevar Bush's ideas by allowing users to 'comment on and change one another's text' (Wikipedia article on Wiki, accessed 12-29-2009).

♦ In December 2013 a video of a 2006 interview of Ward Cunningham with John Gage at the Computer History Museum was available at this link.