WHAT’S THE STORY?
IT was on this date in 1991 that English computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee published an invitation for people to collaborate on a “WorldWideWeb” project. Most people accept that invitation as the start of the web. In the 30 years since, the entire world has been changed by the internet.
In its list of 80 moments that shaped the world, as chosen by prominent academics, cultural figures and scientists, for the British Council, the invention of the web ranked no 1. The British Council states: “The fastest-growing communications medium of all time, the internet has changed the shape of modern life forever. We can connect with each other instantly, all over the world.”
It’s important to note that Berners-Lee did not invent the internet in the sense of interconnected computer networks. As computer technology improved in the 1960s, networking became a major field of development, with the US Department of Defense a source of funding for research. The word internet was coined as far back as 1974, and by 1982, the Internet Protocol Suite came into being. Networks of various kinds expanded and access to supercomputers greatly increased the speed at which information could be shared before Berners-Lee transformed the science of the internet.
The words internet and web are often used without distinction but the web is just one internet service, albeit the most important.
WHAT DID WE DO BEFORE THE WEB?
WE wrote letters or telephoned each other, everybody went shopping except for mail order catalogue users, information came from books and libraries, music came via records and tapes, Amazon was a river or legendary female warrior, social media was done via a notice board, Donald Trump couldn’t tweet, and trolls were cave-dwellers in Norse mythology. About the nearest thing to the modern internet before Berners-Lee intervened were Bulletin Board Systems which were invented in Chicago in 1978 by Ward Christensen and Randy Seuss. They called their system Computerized Bulletin Board System (CBBS) and Bulletin Boards linked via modems were soon all the rage with computer enthusiasts. Yet it was very much a hobby for most computer users outside of academia.
WHAT DID TIM BERNERS-LEE DO?
THE genius of Berners-Lee (below), then working at CERN, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research in Switzerland, was to see the possibilities of hypertext – text displayed on a computer with hyperlinks to other text that the reader can immediately access – linked to data networks.
According to Cern’s official history: “Tim Berners-Lee wrote the first proposal for the World Wide Web in March 1989 and his second in May 1990. Together with Belgian systems engineer Robert Cailliau, this was formalised as a management proposal in November 1990. This outlined the principal concepts and it defined important terms behind the Web. The document described a ‘hypertext project’ called ‘WorldWideWe’ in which a ‘web’ of ‘hypertext document’ could be viewed by ‘browsers’. By the end of 1990, Tim Berners-Lee had the first web server and browser up and running at CERN, demonstrating his ideas. He developed the code for his Web server on a NeXT computer. To prevent it being accidentally switched off, the computer had a hand-written label in red ink: “This machine is a server. DO NOT POWER IT DOWN!!”
So far only scientists and managers within CERN knew what was going on. On August 6, 1991, Berners-Lee announced the WWW software on internet newsgroups and interest in the project spread rapidly around the world.
Berners-Lee explained: “Most of the technology involved in the web, like the hypertext, like the internet, multifont text objects, had all been designed already. I just had to put them together.
“It was a step of generalising, going to a higher level of abstraction, thinking about all the documentation systems out there as being possibly part of a larger imaginary documentation system.”
Berners-Lee has played a guiding role in the development of the communication tool ever since, earning a knighthood and a host of prestigious awards.
HOW HAVE WE BEEN SINCE THEN?
IT is pretty hard to imagine life without t’internet but it has not been all plain sailing. The newspaper industry was one of the biggest casualties as people migrated online to gain their news.
The misuse of the web by dark forces such as terrorists, online piracy and trolling have led some to avoid the web as much as they can. But looked at objectively, there is little doubt that the World Wide Web has been a great force for good.
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