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You probably didn't realize it, but as you were catching waves at the beach over the weekend, virtual surfers celebrated the 20th anniversary of the World Wide Web. Put the pitchfork down, Peter, and tell Timmy to stop waving that torch around. We're not claiming the Internet is but 20 years old. What took place on August 6, 1991 would forever change not just the world of computers, but the world, period.
Tim Berners-Lee, then a scientist at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) and now Director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), made public his proposal for the World Wide Web.
"The WWW project aims to allow all links to be made to any information anywhere," Berners-Lee posted on an alt.hypertext newsgroup. "The address format includes an access method (=namespace), and for most name spaces a hostname and some sort of path."
It was a simple idea, one in which "The aim would be to allow a place to be found for any information or references which one felt was important, and a way of finding it afterwards. The result should be sufficiently attractive to use that the information contained would grow past a critical threshold, so that the usefulness of the scheme would in turn encourage its increased use," according a quote CNet dug up.
And that it did, beyond anything Berners-Lee could have conceived at the time. According to stats from InternetWorldStats.com, over 2 billion people now surf the Web, representing nearly a third (30.2 percent) of the world's population.
Image Credit: CERN
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Insula Gilliganis
August 08, 2011 at 12:25pm
I wrote the following over at HardOCP.com (http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?p=1037606594) but thought I would repost it here as well since I spent about an hour on writing it..
WWW is celebrating it's 20th birthday.. again??
Mmmm.. wonder what these articles were celebrating back in 2009??
"On March 13th, 2009 the World Wide Web will turn 20 years old. Sir Tim Berners-Lee invented this world-changing layer on top of the Internet on this day in 1989" http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/happy_20th_birthday_world_wide_web.php
"CERN on March 13 celebrates the 20th anniversary of a proposal entitled, "Information Management: A Proposal," by Tim Berners-Lee, which would become the blueprint for the World Wide Web" http://www.scientificamerican.com/report.cfm?id=web-20-anniversary
"In 1989, Tim Berners-Lee, an Oxford-educated computer scientist then working at CERN in Switzerland, proposed a new system for managing online information. Berners-Lee envisaged a system in which hypertext documents could be linked together. By clicking on a 'hot spot' (or link) in one document, the user would be automatically transferred to the document that was referenced in that link. What's more, Berners-Lee suggested that documents could be linked together without any central control or coordination. The proposal was accepted, and a year later Berners-Lee finished the first ever browser. He named it WorldWideWeb (with no spaces). It ran on a NeXT cube computer, and despite its lack of colour and absence of in-line graphics, the fundamentals would be familiar to today's web users" http://www.techradar.com/news/internet/web/celebrating-20-years-of-the-world-wide-web-615150
"The modern day internet, better known as the "World Wide Web", which has completely transformed the way we live, has entered into its twenties today as many will mark the anniversary. Its inception dates back to 13 March 1989, when a computer scientist, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research, popularly known as CERN Laboratory, presented a paper containing means and methods by which particles physics scientists could easily share and find out essential electronics documents" http://www.itproportal.com/2009/03/13/world-wide-web-20-years-old-today/
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Heard Leo Laporte on his "Tech Guy" podcast this past weekend mention without elaboration that the WWW was 21 years old.. perhaps he was basing the WWW birthday as December 25, 1990 because of this..
"In the fall of 1990, Berners-Lee took about a month to develop the first web browser on a NeXT computer, including an integrated editor that could create hypertext documents. He deployed the program on his and Cailliau's computers, and they were both communicating with the world's first web server at info.cern.ch on December 25, 1990" http://www.livinginternet.com/w/wi_lee.htm
This does make for an interesting question.. when does something really begin.. when it is just an idea in the womb or a full fledged conceived and working product. Apparently some thought 2 years ago that Berners-Lee's March 13, 1989 proposal was the birth of WWW, while some others believe it is when the actual first web server was activated. And for those celebrating it on August 6, 1991, it is when Berners-Lee "posted a notice on the alt.hypertext newsgroup about where to download their web server and line mode browser, making it available around the world. Web servers started popping up around the globe almost immediately" http://www.livinginternet.com/w/wi_lee.htm - Apparently, like Google's birthday http://www.csmonitor.com/Innovation/Horizons/2010/0927/Google-and-the-birthday-mystery, there may be more than 1 answer.
yackman01
August 08, 2011 at 1:01pm
LOL! Gotta love south park. between that and solving "Global Warming"
