WorldWideWeb turns 20
06 Aug 2011
This day, exactly 20 years ago, the World Wide Web was born, marking a significant day in the progress of the Internet. On 6 August 1991, Tim Berners-Lee, published the first Web page, making the WorldWideWeb available publicly.
It all began at CERN, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research, in the 1980s, where physicist Tim Berners-Lee followed up a proposal for information management. He showed how information could be transferred easily over the Internet by using hypertext - the point-and-click system of navigating through information.
With support from Robert Cailliau, a systems engineer, Berners-Lee succeeded in converting a NeXT computer as the first web server, hypermedia browser and web editor.
NeXT was, incidentally, the firm that Steve Jobs launched after he was pushed out of Apple in the mid-1980s.
His 1989 paper proposing 'A large hypertext database with typed links', did not gain much momentum within CERN, but was later expanded into a more concrete document http://www.w3.org/Proposal.html proposing a global interlinking of documents, using hypertext links.
In 1990, Barners-Lee succeeded in connecting hypertext with the internet and personal computers, thereby having a single information network. The system helped CERN physicists share all the computer-stored information at the laboratory - hypertext enables users to browse easily between texts on web pages using links.
Berners-Lee created a browser-editor in order to make the Web a creative space to share and edit information and build a common hypertext, and, on 6 May 1990, the WorldWideWeb was born.
Robert Cailliau, collaborator on the World Wide Web project, was the first Web surfer.
The world's first-ever web site and web server, running on a NeXT computer at CERN was `Info.cern.ch' and the first web page address was http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html, which centered on information regarding the WWW project.
In 1993, CERN opened the World Wide Web for free use and further development, helping it to transform the way people interact across the world.
The system has since been improved to a new technology, which has fundamentally changed the world.
A later version of the first page http://www.w3.org/History/19921103-hypertext/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html was archived in the following year, which acted as a beginner's guide to the new technology.
Things then moved fast for the Web. The first image was uploaded in 1992, with Berners-Lee choosing a picture of French parodic rock group Les Horribles Cernettes.
While a number of browser applications were developed during the first two years of the Web, it was Mosaic, launched in 1993 that had the most impact. By the end of that year Unix, the Commodore Amiga, Windows and Mac OS became available.
The first browser to be freely available and accessible to the public, it also inspired the birth of the first commercial browser, Netscape Navigator, while Mosaic's technology went on to form the basis of Microsoft's Internet Explorer.
Plug-ins like Flash have now expanded the scope of the Web, while the primary data tool HTML itself has evolved to the point where its latest version can handle video natively.
The Web is now a part of our everyday lives - something we access at home, on the move, on our phones and on TV.
The WorldWideWeb now has 80 million members, with many more computers connected to the internet, and billions of users.
