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.

KenLV

August 08, 2011 at 11:18am

What, no props for our bud Al Gore? :[