Today marks a very important day in the history of the internet, and the World Wide Web: It’s 25 years since the public gained access to the World Wide Web, designed by Sir Tim Berners-Lee.
Known as ‘Internaut Day’, it was one 23 August, 1991 that Berners-Lee and CERN opened up the web to the public.
Then in 1993 CERN announced it would make the code for the web royalty-free, forever.
The world wide web might have come a long way since then but true to form, you can still go right back to the start and visit the very first web page ever created:
Unsurprisingly the first page is in fact a holding page which helps explain firstly what the world wide web is, how new users can start using it and technical details on how it was built.
The World Wide Web and the internet are actually two different things, often confused in popular culture.
The internet is the structure that allows information to be sent across computers and devices over thousands of miles in the blink of an eye. It was first developed in the 60s be the US as a defensive tool that would allow military installations to communicate with each other.
It was then in the 80s that Sir Tim Berners Lee took these ideas and opened them up into the World Wide Web - a public space within which information could be stored and shared.
Berners-Lee then created the world’s first browser, allowing users to easily search through all this information and view it.
They key to Berners-Lee’s success was the development of three new technologies:
- A system by which each page would be uniquely identified. Today we know them as URLs or Uniform Resource Locators.
- A language of code by which a web page could be written by humans and interpreted by computers, universally. This became known as HyperText Markup Language (HTML).
- Finally, a means with which to request the information. Called HyperTest Transfer Protocol (HTTP), it’s a process that allows a person to request a web page and then have the server send that page to the user. Think of it as a digital librarian, bringing you books on request.
Since creating the World Wide Web, Berners-Lee has gone on to be an activist for freedom of access for the internet, most recently saying that it was becoming ‘more and more like a human right.’