We humans have just one birthday, but the Internet has at least three. The World Wide Web, the idea that made the Internet easy to access and paved the way for the likes of Google, Amazon and Facebook, is now celebrating one of its most significant birthdays. — dpa
GENEVA: There’s no general consensus on what day the World Wide Web was born. Thirty years ago, on April 30, 1993, the European Nuclear Research Centre Cern made the World Wide Web (WWW) available to the public.
But the birthday of the web could also be Aug 6, 1991, the day the web concept was published in a group on Usenet. Or it could be the time around Christmas 1990, when the first web server went online.
Then again, an invention of this magnitude deserves at least three birthdays.
It’s easy to forget just how different life was before the World Wide Web (WWW). We did all our shopping outside of the home, we looked up facts in actual books, we made bank transfers on real paper and we watched films that we rented from the local video shop.
Things didn’t just get easier with the Internet. There was no information overload, no cyberbullying and no addictive social media platforms.
In the 30 years since the WWW was opened up to the public, it has dramatically changed the lives of billions.
The historic step of the European nuclear research centre Cern (Conseil européen pour la recherche nucléaire) to deliberately forego royalties and patenting for the worldwide web contributed significantly to the importance of the Internet in its present form.
When the Internet (Arpanet) came into the world in 1969, for decades the new type of network was only suitable for a few experts to exchange information.
Complicated commands had been needed to communicate, and it was only with the invention of the WWW and browsers with user-friendly interfaces that the Internet became a mass phenomenon.
Another WWW breakthrough came in 1993 when Marc Andreessen developed the Mosaic browser at the University of Illinois, the ancestor of today’s browsers like Chrome (from Google), Safari (from Apple) and Firefox.
With browsers, a mouse click was suddenly all that was needed to use the Internet. It was only with browsers that companies like Google, Amazon and Facebook could rise to become tech giants.
The trend intensified with the advent of mobile Internet. With Apple’s iPhone, it became apparent from 2007 onwards that getting online could soon be done not just by anyone with the means, but anywhere there was a network signal.
The World Wide Web was founded by the British physicist Tim Berners-Lee, who is now only 67 years old. At the end of the 1980s, the computer scientist wanted to contain the chaotic approach to information at Cern.
In March 1989, he proposed to his employer a project based on hypertext to simplify the exchange of data between researchers worldwide.
His colleague Robert Cailliau helped him, and around Christmas of 1990, Berners-Lee set up the world’s first web server (“info.cern.ch”).
On Aug 6, 1991, he made the first website on the Internet public, explaining the basics of browsing to newcomers. “There is no ‘top’ to the World-Wide Web. You can look at it from many points of view,” says the website, still active today as a piece of web history.
Berners-Lee’s development was based on three ideas: HTML, HTTP and URL. The text-based markup language “Hypertext Markup Language” describes how pages are formatted and linked on different computer platforms.
The “Hypertext Transfer Protocol” defines the technical channel that computers use to communicate via the internet. And the “Uniform Resource Locator” (superordinate URI, “Universal Resource Identifier”) describes the web address with which content can be found on the net.
Berners-Lee initially received little support from Cern’s top management: “Vague but exciting” was the handwritten comment of his boss Mike Sendall on a memo.
“Nothing happened,” Berners-Lee later recalled in his book Weaving The Web, describing the initial reaction to his proposal. “There was no forum from which I could command a response.”
Mosaic browser inventor Andreessen (now 51) meanwhile set out 30 years ago with Netscape to make his software the leading online platform.
But Microsoft founder Bill Gates (now 67) followed suit with his Explorer. In the ensuing browser war, Netscape fell by the wayside.
Tim Berners-Lee later went on to the US in 1994 to found the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
Under his leadership, the technical developments of the web are still standardised in this committee today. Since 2016, the Briton has held a chair at Oxford University.
Berners-Lee, who never gained wealth through his invention, is now worried about the state of the Web.
On the 30th anniversary of the publication of his landmark paper, he warned against the misuse of data, disinformation, hate speech and censorship.
Berners-Lee is also critical of attempts to use blockchain technology to build a next generation of the web in which it will be easier to pay for content. – dpa
