The 30th Anniversary!

bydavehayes

3.2K followers

5 years ago

Today is the 30th Anniversary of ...

The WorldWideWeb

That right, 30 years ago today, a chap called

Sir Tim Berners-Lee invented the WorldWide Web, right back in 1989

Tim was a computer scientist,who was born in London and after graduating from Oxford, became a computer scientist at CERN, baed in Geneva, Switzerland

Scientists from all over the world came to use its accelerators, and Sir Tim noticed that they were having difficulty sharing information

To quote Tim and to partially explain the reason the WWW was started he says

“In those days, there was different information on different computers, but you had to log on to different computers to get at it. Also, sometimes you had to learn a different program on each computer. Often it was just easier to go and ask people when they were having coffee…”,

So he thought he saw a way to solve this problem – one that he could see could also have much broader applications. Already, millions of computers were being connected together through the fast-developing internet and Berners-Lee realised they could share information by exploiting an emerging technology called hypertext yes the same hypertext which wordpress uses today

So in March 1989 he laid out an Information Management: A Proposal document
which was rejected by CERNs CEO because it was not an official CERN project, however the CEO saw something in the document and so gave Tim time to work on this in September 1990, using one of Steve Jobs first computers called a Next

By October of 1990, Tim had written the three fundamental technologies that remain the foundation of today’s web (and which you may have seen appear on parts of your web browser):

HTML

URL. &

HTTP

Berners Lee, also wrote the first web page editor/browser (“WorldWideWeb.app”) as well as the first web server (“httpd“). By the end of 1990, the first web page was served on the open internet, and in 1991, people outside of CERN were invited to join this new web community.

With the web continuing to grow, Tim realised that its true potential would only be unleashed if anyone, anywhere could use it without paying a fee or having to ask for permission.

He explained

“Had the technology been proprietary, and in my total control, it would probably not have taken off. You can’t propose that something be a universal space and at the same time keep control of it.”



So, Berners Lee and others advocated to ensure that CERN would agree to make the underlying code available on a royalty-free basis, forever.

This decision was announced in April 1993, and sparked a global wave of creativity, collaboration and innovation never seen before. In 2003, the companies developing new web standards committed to a Royalty Free Policy for their work. In 2014, the year we celebrated the web’s 25th birthday, almost two in five people around the world were using it.

And that is how the WorldWideWeb was born.