Celebration time: today is World Wide Web Day!

World Wide Web Day is a global celebration dedicated to web browsing, the online activity that brings the world at your fingertips and a wealth of knowledge in a matter of seconds to you.

This was not always the case...it started all in 1989.

Did you know that the co-inventor of the worldwide web is Belgian? (chauvinistic mode)

His name is Robert Cailliau.

He worked at CERN in Geneva from 1974 and in 1990, joined forces with his colleague Tim Berners-Lee on a project for a hypertext system designed to improve document sharing at CERN.
He collaborated on the second version of the document describing the project which would result in the World Wide Web.(www. also jokingly called wild wild web by me)

"Suppose all the information stored on computers everywhere were linked. Suppose I could program my computer to create a space in which everything could be linked to everything.”

-Tim Berners-Lee ,co-inventor of the World Wide Web.

Internet versus worldwide web

The World Wide Web (www), commonly called the web is a public hypertext system operating on the internet. The image of a spider’s web comes from the hyperlinks that link the web pages to each other. Often confused with the internet, the web is just one application of it, alongside emails and peer-to-peer file sharing.

A bit of history

As it has grown significantly over the years. There was significant growth in 1993.

The number of websites that were live at this point were still very small in comparison to the number of sites that are live today. Over 1.74 billion websites are on the Internet according to https://www.websitehostingrating.com/.

Also, according to them, there are over 4+ billion internet users spanning the globe.

Interesting Facts

Yahoo! Directory was launched in January 1994, and the search engine then followed this – Yahoo! Search – in 1995. It was, therefore, the first popular search engine on the World Wide Web. We also saw the start of web commerce in 1995, as Amazon and eBay were both founded.

Do you recall when you got your first computer or came on the World Wide Web?

I do.

When I did my service in the army, I got payed some money and still living in “Hotel Mama” so with no monthly bills to pay , I saved for my first computer. After doing my military service for 10 months I went on living on my own and one of the first things I did was applying for a dial up internet connection (remember that one?) by my phone company.

How about you?

All the best,

Luc