Happy Birthday to the Internet: 25 years ago – Internet became basis of our communication and information exchange.
Internet, the global platform that connects humans and machines, was comissioned 25 years ago today. On 23 August, 1991, the public accessed World Wide Web for the first time. The credit for designing and deploying the WWW protocol go to Sir Tim Berners-Lee.
World Wide Web or Internet, as we know it today, was developed by computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee at CERN Labs in Switzerland. If legends are anything to go by, Sir Lee wrote the protocol for WWW on a NeXT machine, a computer developed by late Apple CEO Steve Jobs, after he resigned from Apple, In fact, Tim Berners-Lee was one of the many attendees at Apple’s WWDC, and wanted to show his ideas of internet to Jobs.
While Internet and World Wide Web are two different things, they are often referred in conjunction with each other. Internet often refers to the network, whereas the World Wide Web refers to the plethora of information available on this network.
Internet has been defined and developed by many computer scientists in the past, but Tim Berners-Lee designed the basic foundation. In 1980, Sir Lee developed the concept of hyperlink, an easy method to link different pages and contents together. Based on hyperlink, Sir Lee built HyperText Transfer Protocol (referred to as HTTP).
In 1990, Sir Lee eventually built HTML, URL, a web browser, server and the very first web page to make World Wide Web a reality. The very first webpage based on this architecture went live on August 6, 1991. While the first page was only accessible to CERN members, the first publicly available web page was accessed on August 23, 1991. This day, almost 25 years ago – Internet became basis of our communication and information exchange.
Internet, even after 25 years of its development and deployment, is underserved at best. “The decision to make the web an open system was necessary for it to be universal. You can’t propose that something be a universal space and at the same time keep control of it,†reads a post by Sir Tim Berners-Lee in his website.
Sir Lee is still striving to make internet accessible to everyone and is one of the strongest preachers of net neutrality. This day, when you access information, read a blog or watch video, this man deserves all the credit for making it possible.
By Karthekayan Iyer
