It is difficult to think of anything more important to the modern life than the web. Without it, most of us would probably either die of boredom or turn out to be a different person in every possible way other than anatomically.
The reason you’re being reminded its significance is because it has been 25 years since the first World Wide Web went up. And after all these years, it is still there today!
Created by Sir Tim Berners-Lee in 1991 on a NEXT computer, the World Wide Web was originally born as a proposal to create a global hypertext system back in 1989 which was tested a year later. Then on August 6, 1990, Berners-Lee posted a description of it online.
The website is a far cry from what we have come to expect today, but wasn’t unusual for a period when they contained mostly links. Within the year, the first web server outside of Europe opened while in ’93, CERN released the source code to the public. The computer on which the code was developed remains at CERN to this day.
Other than that, Berners-Lee worked on the world’s first browser as well as the various mechanisms of the web including HTTP, HTML and URLs, effectively shaping the internet by himself.
But instead of stopping there, Berners-Lee has devoted as much, if not more, effort in protecting it and keeping it free and equally-accessible. “I feel a certain amount of inventor’s pride,” as he said recently of his invention. “My greatest pride has been the spirit of collaboration we’ve had for the last 25 years.”