On August 6, 1991 Tim Berners Lee, (now Sir) founder of the world wide web posted a short summary of the project on the alt.hypertext newsgroup. The message read: “The WWW project aims to allow all links to be made to any information anywhere.” This implies that on Saturday, the World Wide Web celebrated its 20th birthday, reports the Dailymail.
It began as a simple page of links that allowed a group of scientists to share data in the confines of their laboratories. But, in the two decades since, it has become an inseparable part of the lives of billions of people.
http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html – the first website – was hosted at the rather cryptic URL nxoc01.cern.ch.
The NeXT Computer used by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN became the first web server. When it went live, he said, “We are interested in spreading the web to other areas and having gateway servers for other data. Collaborators welcome.”
And people did collaborate. By 1992, there were 50 web servers around the world and, as of Friday, there were 19.68billion pages – more than three times the world’s population.
Before this the web was used to allow physicists at the CERN physics laboratory to share data, news and documentation, but Berners-Lee’s post released the technology to the general public. By making the web openly available and royalty free, it quickly advanced to a globally used service, no longer the secret of the technologically minded. At the Great Britons 2004 Awards, Sir Tim Berners-Lee was named Greatest Briton for his invention of the World Wide Web
The NeXT computer used by Sir Tim Berners Lee
Berners-Lee isn’t credited with connecting up all the computers – he developed three technologies that made it possible for users to better find and share information among these connected systems.
The first was the development of uniform resource locators (URLs), which are like mailing addresses for information.
The second is HyperText Markup Language (HTML), which is the code a web browser needs to show the text, graphics and hyperlinking systems.
His third invention was the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) that enables requests and file transmissions to occur between Web browsers and Web server.
In the 20 years that followed, the web has become a daily part of modern life. In between, it has been the platform for the boom and bust of dot-com businesses in the late 1990s and early 2000s, the rise of social networking, Google and YouTube, and the more sinister art of cyber crime.
In the past few years, the web has grown further and is now included on most new phones and televisions.
Some interesting facts relating to the World Wide Web and the Internet:
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Domain names that now form the base of the web network, pre-date the first web site by six years.
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The first commercial domain name, symoblics.com was registered on March 15, 1985.
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The phase ‘surfing on the Internet’ was coined by author Jean Armour Polly in June 1992.
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In 2008, mobile access to the Web exceeded desktop-computer based access for the first time.
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According to the worldwidewebsize.com, the Web now has atleast 19.68 billion pages – more than three times the world population.
Though some people use the term Internet and the World Wide Web interchangeably, it is to be noted that the terms are related but are not the same. The term Internet, coined in 1974, refers to the vast networking infrastructure that connects millions of computers, while the WWW is the method of accessing information over the Internet through the web pages.
Sir Berners Lee may not have guessed the impact and the extent to which the Web would grow in the 20 years of its existence, yet there is no doubt that in the next 20 years it will grow exponentially.