DAVID ADAMS looks at the origins of the World Wide Web…
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PICTURE: ilker/www.sxc.hu |
First conceived 25 years ago this week, the World Wide Web (or WWW as we’ve grown to known it), has changed the world in ways that we are still yet to fully fathom.
Its origins – that is, those of the WWW, not the internet as a whole; that was established some 20 years earlier – go back to 12th March, 1989, when British computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee, then working at European Organisation for Nuclear Research (known as CERN), put forward a somewhat brief proposal for a series of technologies that would make the internet accessible to anyone.
It took until Christmas Day the following year before the idea went live after Berners-Lee specified the fundamental technologies – they include the web addresses known as URLs, the link protocol known as HTTP and webpage “markup language” known as HTML – which still undergird the world wide web today.
Initially confined to use by a small number of researchers, in April 1993, CERN declared that the World Wide Web technology could be freely used by anyone with no fees payable to CERN for its use.
More than two in five people around the world are now connected to the web. Among the many challenges being discussed at the 25th anniversary celebrations are how to connect the other three.
You can join in the celebrations at www.webat25.org. For more on discussions about the future of the web, check out https://webwewant.org.
If you have something you’d like to know the origins of, simply send an email to [email protected].
