25 years of the world wide web
For anybody under the age of 20, it is hard to imagine what life would be like without the web, which is not to be confused with the internet — a massive chain of networks, which the web uses.
But when Lee first submitted his idea while working at Swiss physics laboratory, Cern, the response from his boss was the brief: “Vague, but exciting.” He went on to develop an invention that has revolutionised the lives of billions, with two out of five people in the world now connected.
Based on his earlier programme for storing information called Enquire, it was designed to allow people to work together by combining their knowledge in a web of hypertext documents.
He wrote the first world wide web server, “httpd”, and the first client “WorldWideWeb”, a what-you-see-is-what-you-get hypertext browser/editor.
It launched publicly on August 6, 1991.
Physics graduate Lee originally developed the web to meet the demand for information-sharing between physicists in universities and institutes around the world.
Other information retrieval systems which used the internet were available at the time, but the web’s simplicity, along with the fact that the technology was made royalty-free in 1993, led to its rapid adoption and development.
By late 1993, there were over 500 known web servers, and the world wide web accounted for 1% of internet traffic. Two decades later, there are an estimated 630m websites online.
In 2009, Lee founded the World Wide Web Foundation which has a mission statement to “establish the open web as a global public good and a basic right, ensuring that everyone can access and use it freely”.
Its Web Index, first launched in 2012, measures how well different countries around the world are harnessing the benefits of an open and universal web, and last year he spoke of it having highlighted how the internet and social media were being used to expose wrongdoing in the world — leaving some governments threatened.
Speaking in November, he said: “One of the most encouraging findings of this year’s Web Index is how the web and social media are increasingly spurring people to organise, take action, and try to expose wrongdoing in every region of the world.
“But some governments are threatened by this, and a growing tide of surveillance and censorship now threatens the future of democracy.
“Bold steps are needed now to protect our fundamental rights to privacy and freedom of opinion and association online.”
He also said he backed whistleblowers who use the internet to “protect society’s interests”.
It seems such a modern invention, but the world wide web can trace its foundation back to before the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War.
Tim Berners-Lee, a British scientist working at Cern in Switzerland, submits a proposal for a “distributed information system” to allow researchers to deal with huge amounts of information generated by physics experiments.
The world’s first website goes live at Info.cern.ch.
The world wide web is launched publicly as Berners-Lee publishes details of the project on the internet.
Pipex introduces dial-up connection to the UK.
Cern releases the world wide web source code and announces it will be available free of charge. It also releases a basic browser.
First International World-Wide Web conference, held at Cern. It is hailed as the “Woodstock of the web”.
By the end of the year there are 10,000 servers, 2,000 of them commercial. There are 10m users, with traffic, according to Cern, equivalent to shipping the collected works of Shakespeare every second.
Jeff Bezos launches Amazon.com as an online bookshop from his garage in Seattle, Washington.
Microsoft launches first version of its Internet Explorer web browser.
Google.com is registered as a web domain by Larry Page and Sergey Brin.
The DotCom Boom reaches its peak. The previous few years had seen a rush to invest in online firms.
DotCom Crash — the bubble bursts because few of the firms that were invested in made any money. March: Virgin introduces high-speed broadband.
Harvard psychology student Mark Zuckerberg launches Facebook with his college roommates.
YouTube is launched.
Twitter is created by Jack Dorsey, Evan Williams, Biz Stone and Noah Glass.
Apple launch the iPhone.
Apple launches the App Store.
Apple launches the iPad.
Picture editing and sharing website Instagram is launched. In April 2012, it was sold to Facebook for $1bn (€720m).
Facebook pays $19bn for mobile phone messaging system WhatsApp.
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