August 6th 1991 is the date of birth of the now widely used World Wide Web. The date which has thrown open thte doors of freedom of information. The world became a global village because of World Wide Web. On August 6, 1991, Tim Berners-Lee published a report of World Wide Web (WWW) and made internet available to the public. WWW took technology to a different direction and connected people in a way which was beyond imagination.
In the 1980s, European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) was undertaking researches that has involved many scientists and researchers who are distributed across the geographies. There was a need to share the files and collaborate the critical data. The main problem was that they didn’t have common systems or presentation software. Computing was just evolving. Despite the challenges, a contractor at CERN named Tim Berners-Lee saw the opportunity and there born World Wide Web.
The Internet began as an international network. It was quite a great achievement to connect computers across the globe and bring them on to a network where information, files, messages could be exchanged.
On December 20th 1990, world’s first website went live at CERN. It was Christmas of 1990 and Lee had defined most of the common terminologies, including URL, http and HTML. The address of the world’s first website is http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html. The web server was ran on a NeXT computer located at CERN.
Here is the timeline of World Wide Web
Tim Berners-Lee had made a project in 1980 which was about readable texts embedded in links
In 1989, Tim Berners-Lee submitted his proposal of WWW in a descriptive format.
Initially he thought of the names like, Information Mesh. The Information Mine and Mine of Information.
In 1990, with the help of Robert Cailliau, Lee built a Hypertext project WorldWideWeb which could be accessed through a browser
In 1991, Tim published a short summary of WWW and internet was made accessible to the public
In 1993, CERN announced that internet would be free to everyone and there would be no fee for its use
In 1994, many websites erupted and the internet service got popular
In 1999, Darci DiNucci coined the term Web 2.0 which was later popularised in the year 2004
Its due to Web 2.0 that we see user-generated content, better usability, user friendly and two way communication on the Web
Berners Lee was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 2004 for his work
The technological revolution in 1991 provided with just one website and now, in 2015 there are about billion websites on the web.
By Premji
