March 12th 2019 celebrates 30 years of the history of the web. From the first web page to the way humans connect, communicate, spend and live their everyday lives, we take a look at the major events that have shaped our lives over the past 30 years…
Nowadays it is common for people to use the terms web and internet interchangeably even though they refer to two distinct technologies. The internet is the network that the World Wide Web – or web for short – operates on and has been around in one form or another since the late sixties. The web, on the other hand, has only been online for 28 years, with the idea for the web being 30 years old. It was in March 1989 that Tim Berners-Lee, while working at CERN, that he wrote Information Management: A Proposal, which included “[…] a solution based on a distributed hypertext system”.
His manager at the time calls it “vague, but exciting”, and encourages him to explore the ideas further, and over the next 18 months he creates many of the tools we still use on the web, including HTTP, HTML, a browser and WYSIWYG editor for web pages, and later the URL structure we’re all familiar with. The first web server went online at CERN in December 1990, but it wasn’t until the following August that Berners-Lee shared details of the web server and the WWW Browser-Editor to newsgroups and published the first publicly accessible web page.
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