The World Wide Web turns 15 (again)
So the first web server was launched in March 1989 by Tim Berners-Lee and connected to another by the end of the following year. I've recently been pointing to 2011 as the 20th anniversary of this and one worth celebrating.
Some are claiming that today is a more important anniversary, which would be 15 years since Cern made the web public domain.
Plenty of history here from Dr James Gillies, Director of communications, Cern, such as:
'... however, the original browseri only ran on NeXT computers. To see it in all its glory, people at Cern had to visit Tim Berners-Lee's office, .......... that was hardly the point.'
Or:
With thoughts towards the future including this by Tim Berners-Lee:
Let me first say that I am extremely optimistic. The web has been a tremendous tool for people to do a lot of good even though you can find bad stuff out there. The experience of the development of the web by so many people collaborating across the globe has just been a fantastic experience. That experience continues.
The experience of international collaboration continues. Also the spirit that really we have only started to explore the possibilities, that continues.
To look back on the web after 15 years is in fact wrong. We have to get a foothold on this 15 years and look forward.
The future is always in the past and for the web particularly. In a hundred years, 15 years will seem to be just the infancy of the web, when the semantic web wasn't even completely deployed.
You couldn't even find all the data in the world immediately at your fingertips.
What's exciting is that people are building new social systems, new systems of review, new systems of governance. My hope is that those will produce... new ways of working together effectively and fairly which we can use globally to manage ourselves as a planet.
Sir Tim Berners-Lee developed the web while at the physics lab Cern
