The Internet Pilot to Physics

TIPTOP was a web site operated in collaboration between Kenneth Bodin-Holmlund at Umeå University, Mikko Karttunen at McGill University and Guenther Nowotny at the Technical University of Vienna during 1994-1998, and it was originally derived from Physics Around the World (PAW) that was initiated by Karttunen at McGill University.

In a historical perspective, PAW was one of the very first web directories, listing various physics related resources. TIPTOP utilized (at the time) new technologies to handle a news system, a job database, a conference database, and an improved web directory for physics. TIPTOP was the first major site to use PHP with mySQL, today a highly popular combination. Already in 1995, TIPTOP also had an one of the very first embryos of a wiki, called the Living Encyclopedia of Physics, that offered community based editing, an editorial system and peer review, as well as automatic cross linking.

References

• A page entitled "About PhysicsWeb", that mentions TIPTOP
• The TIPTOP Job listings at IOP
• A position paper in Journal of Physics C from 1996, by the creators of TIPTOP, that describes the initiative.