20 Years since the first website was published

It is amazing how quickly time flies. Wired published an interesting article over the weekend which showed that it is in fact 20 years now since the first website was published. It was created by 36 year old physicist Time Berners Lee who worked at a CERN facility in the Swiss Alps.

‘Info.cern.ch was the address of the world’s first-ever web site and web server, running on a NeXT computer at CERN. The first web page address was http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html, which centred on information regarding the WWW project. Visitors could learn more about hypertext, technical details for creating their own webpage, and even an explanation on how to search the Web for information. There are no screenshots of this original page and, in any case, changes were made daily to the information available on the page as the WWW project developed. You may find a later copy (1992) on the World Wide Web Consortium website.'

At the time, Berners Lee and a few of his colleagues were the only people who had access to web browsing software and most of the word didn't even know what was going on behind closed doors. As the years passed, web servers and browsing software developed and here we are now 20 years later, with the net being an integral part of everyone's life.

Wired explain the foundation of the W3C “In 1994, Berners-Lee founded the World Wide Web Consortium (often referred to as “W3C”) at MIT in order to create standards for the web to ensure that different websites would all work the same way. Berners-Lee, now 56, is still the director of the W3C, in addition to several other positions he holds. While there are and surely always will be some deviations from the standards by many websites and browsers, it’s not a stretch to say that the web as we know it would probably not exist if not for the W3C’s guidance.

It can be hard now, even for many of us who regularly used the Internet before there was a World Wide Web, to remember that there was a time when the two terms weren’t considered nearly synonymous by the general public. Of course, that’s partly because, before the proliferation of websites that followed Mosaic’s release (and for some time thereafter), most members of the general public didn’t have the least idea that the Internet even existed.”

Kitguru says: 20 years later and the web has taken over our lives. For the better or for the worse?

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