How old is the World Wide Web? The safest answer to that is probably, “At least 25 years old.” Tim Berners-Lee wrote theoretical descriptions and proposals, and released some code for creating hypertext documents a little more than 25 years ago. This promised a vast improvement over the Internet technology in place at the time, which required some technical knowledge to find and connect to online information. The theory was that the web would allow people to link online documents together to make it easy to navigate from one to another. Eventually, Berners-Lee completed the first website on December 20, 1990, turning theory to reality 25 years ago.
- The first website went online 25 years ago today (Engadget | Jon Fingas) “The inaugural page wasn’t truly public when it went live at CERN on December 20th, 1990 (that wouldn’t happen until August 1991), and it wasn’t much more than an explanation of how the hypertext-based project worked. However, it’s safe to say that this plain page laid the groundwork for much of the internet as you know it – even now, you probably know one or two people who still think the web is the internet.”
- The birth of the web (CERN) “The website described the basic features of the web; how to access other people’s documents and how to set up your own server. The NeXT machine – the original web server – is still at CERN. As part of the project to restore the first website, in 2013 CERN reinstated the world’s first website to its original address.”
- The World Wide Web is 25 – What will it look like in another 25 years time? (Forbes | Theo Priestley) “But what will the web look like in 25 years time, and how marked a change from today will it be? Today we throw around the terms ‘dynamic’, ‘responsive’, ‘mobile first’ to describe the web and websites as we know it. But in 25 years time the web may evolve to be considered a living entity in its own right, and the ‘Big Bang’, that point in time we can point to when it started, will be attributed to what we know today as The Internet Of Things.”
- Inside Tim Berner’s-Lee’s first website on its 25th birthday (Computing | Peter Gothard) “So this Christmas Day, when you’re sitting on your sofa, iPad in hand, watching Zoella’s sponsored festive beauty haul or enjoying photos of your friend’s dog eating some tinsel, perhaps raise a glass of sherry to Sir Tim Berners-Lee and his clever invention from a quarter of a century ago. Without it, the world would be a pretty different place.”
Articles from Ohio Web Library:
- Search for first web page by physicists is as elusive as mysteries of universe. (The Associated Press, 6/12/2013)
- The web at 25: Revisiting Tim Berners-Lee’s amazing proposal document. (Time.com, 3/12/2014 | Harry McCracken)
- Long live the web. (Scientific American, Dec. 2010, p.80-85 | Tim Berners-Lee)
