On August 6, 1991, Tim Berners-Lee introduced the World Wide Web

On August 6, 1991, in a little-known newsgroup—in the early days, an old form of Internet platform—called alt.hypertext, a soon-to-be-famous computer scientist posted something that would change the nature of technology—and. the world—as we have known it. It was in response to a question from one of the experts in his news team, who asked if anyone knew about development efforts in the form of “hypertext links that enable retrieval from many different sources of information?” In other words, will the Internet be easy to access and navigate?

Tim Berners-Lee, a British computer scientist at CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research), used the forum to introduce his new project to the world, writing, “The WorldWideWeb (WWW) Project aims to to allow connections to be made to anyone anywhere The address structure includes the access method (= namespace), and for most namespaces the hostname and path In Berners-Lee’s new era, surfing the Internet required special protocols like Telnet or FTP to connect to other servers, which didn’t have friendly names like popsci.com, but instead, computer names that could not be easily found. Internet communications involved participation in message-based message board services facilitated by services such as Usenet. or CompuServe. In his post, Berners-Lee even includes one of the first URLs, or Uniform Resource Locators, in his newsgroup post, where more information can be found: http://info .cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html (link is still active).

As a result, the World Wide Web began. Later, in October 1998 Normal Science Information technology acknowledged the existence of the Web, and noted that “In fact, the use of the Internet is due to the proliferation of another part of the Net—the World Wide Web.” This article included the first statistics of web users such as “77 percent of all web users are between the ages of 18 and 49,” and 10 million people in the US had shopped online in the segment the first of 1998. It highlighted “portals” such as Yahoo. , to advertise services such as “personal information.” With over 2.6 million websites already available in 1998, the Web had arrived. Seven years before that, it was still just an idea of ​​a computer scientist.

Berners-Lee first presented his ideas to his CERN boss, Mike Sendall, more than two years before the prophetic post, in March 1989. But Sendall’s answer was simple. According to the World Wide Web Foundation, CERN never funded the project, although in September 1990, Sendall gave Berners-Lee time to work on it independently.

In a post on August 6, Berners-Lee shared information about the progress of the WorldWideWeb project and invited collaboration, explaining the basic concepts behind the web, such as HTML, HTTP, and web browsers. that can access and display documents stored on servers. Although the August 6 post is celebrated for announcing the World Wide Web, it is important to note that Berners-Lee also defined the principles of Open Source. He gave away his code for free, encouraged others to “hack” and gave away all his documents and data. “The staff welcomes you!” you wrote.

In 1993, the release of the Mosaic web browser (written by Marc Andreessen) democratized web access, providing a clear user interface that made the web more accessible, convert text-based information into point-and-click pages. The subsequent introduction of Netscape Navigator (again Andreessen) accelerated the commitment. As mentioned by Normal Science, by the late 1990s, the Internet—the Web—had begun to affect business, media, and personal communication. It can be said that today’s social media concepts like Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok can find their roots in a humble newsgroup post written in monospace font on August 6, 1991.