Happy 25th Birthday World Wide Web
Internaut day: Happy 25th Birthday World Wide Web
On this day in history, August 23rd 1991 the World Wide Web was designed and deployed to the world by computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee at CERN in Switzerland. This day is known as Internaut Day.
Internaut is formed from two words ‘Internet’ and ‘astronaut’ and refers to a capable user of the Internet. How the word Internet came about is not known. What is known is that it just became a shortcut around this time for “internetworking”.
Wikipedia’s definition states that the World Wide Web(WWW) is an information space where documents and other web resources are identified by URLs, interlinked by hypertext links, and can be accessed via the Internet. The World Wide Web was invented by English scientist Tim Berners-Lee in 1989. He wrote the first web browser in 1990 while employed at CERN in Switzerland. It has become known simply as the Web.
So you can access the Web through web browsers using the internet.
By October of 1990, Tim had written the three fundamental technologies that remain the foundation of today’s Web (and which you may have seen appear on parts of your Web browser):
- HTML: HyperText Markup Language. The markup (formatting) language for the Web.
- URI: Uniform Resource Identifier. A kind of “address” that is unique and used to identify to each resource on the Web. It is also commonly called a URL.
- HTTP: Hypertext Transfer Protocol. Allows for the retrieval of linked resources from across the Web.
Tim Berners-Lee explained that had the technology been proprietary, and in his total control, it would probably not have taken off. The decision to make the web an open system was necessary for it to be universal. He said “You can’t propose that something be a universal space and at the same time keep control of it.”
The web has had great impact on the world. Both positive and negative but over all it has been more of a blessing than a curse.