30 years ago in March 1989, Tim Berners-Lee wrote a proposal that ultimately became the World Wide Web. Today, there are approximately 1.5 billion websites in the world and there are about 3.5 billion Internet users (about half the population of the earth). About one quarter of all Internet users are Chinese. But what is the Web and how did it begin?
As Google says: “The World Wide Web (“WWW” or the “Web”) is a global information medium which users can read and write via computers connected to the Internet.” The Web is not the same as the Internet. The Web is a service that operates on top of the Internet, just as email and other services operate on top of the Internet.
How did the Web begin? As Wikipedia says: “In 1980, Tim Berners-Lee, an English independent contractor at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Switzerland, built ENQUIRE, as a personal database of people and software models, but also as a way to play with hypertext; each new page of information in ENQUIRE had to be linked to a page.”
In 1984 Tim Berners-Lee returned to CERN and shortly after that TCP/IP protocols were installed some key non-Unix machines at the institution. He wrote a proposal in March 1989 for “a large hypertext database with typed links”. Although the proposal attracted little interest, Berners-Lee was encouraged by his boss, Mike Sendall, to begin implementing his system on a newly acquired NeXT workstation. Thus, 30 years ago in March 1989, Berners-Lee wrote a proposal that ultimately became the World Wide Web.
As Wikipedia says: “By Christmas 1990, Berners-Lee had built all the tools necessary for a working Web: the HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP) 0.9, the HyperText Markup Language (HTML), the first Web browser (named WorldWideWeb, which was also a Web editor), the first HTTP server software (later known as CERN httpd), the first web server (http://info.cern.ch), and the first Web pages that described the project itself. The browser could access Usenet newsgroups and FTP files as well.”
In January 1991 the first Web servers outside CERN itself were switched on. On August 6, 1991, Berners-Lee posted a short summary of the World Wide Web project on the alt.hypertext newsgroup, inviting collaborators. This date is sometimes confused with the public availability of the first web servers, which had occurred months earlier.
By January 1993 there were fifty Web servers across the world. In April 1993 CERN made the World Wide Web available on a royalty-free basis. By October 1993 there were over five hundred servers online.
Initially, a web browser was available only for the NeXT operating system. This shortcoming was discussed in January 1992, and alleviated in April 1992 by the release of Erwise.
The Web was first popularized by Mosaic, a graphical browser launched in 1993 by Marc Andreessen’s team at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign (UIUC).
In April 1993, CERN had agreed that anyone could use the Web protocol and code royalty-free. In May 1994, the first International WWW Conference, organized by Robert Cailliau, was held at CERN; the conference has been held every year since.
In September 1994, Berners-Lee founded the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with support from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and the European Commission. Berners-Lee made the Web available freely, with no patent and no royalties due. The W3C decided that its standards must be based on royalty-free technology, so they can be easily adopted by anyone.
Low interest rates in 1998–99 facilitated an increase in start-up companies. This dot-com boom continued until the dot-com bust of 2001. The bubble burst.
In 2002, high-speed Internet connectivity more affordable due to the overcapacity of telecommunications companies due in part to the dot-com bust and the disappearance of many technology start-ups. During this time, a handful of companies found success developing business models that helped make the World Wide Web a more compelling experience. These include airline booking sites, Google‘s search engine and its profitable approach to keyword-based advertising, as well as eBay‘s auction site and Amazon.com‘s online department store.
Beginning in 2002, new ideas for sharing and exchanging content ad hoc, such as Weblogs and RSS, rapidly gained acceptance on the Web. This new model for information exchange, primarily featuring user-generated and user-edited websites, was dubbed Web 2.0. The Web 2.0 boom saw many new service-oriented startups catering to a newly democratized Web. The growth of the Internet continues.
Wikipedia was launched on January 15, 2001, by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger.
The Web has continued to grow. YouTube is an American video-sharing website headquartered in San Bruno, California. Three former PayPal employees—Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim—created the service in February 2005.
Facebook, Inc. is an American online social media and social networking service company. It is based in Menlo Park, California. It was founded by Mark Zuckerberg, along with fellow Harvard College students and roommates Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes. Since 2006, anyone who claims to be at least 13 years old has been allowed to become a registered user of Facebook. Facebook had more than 2.2 billion monthly active users as of January 2018.
Twitter was created in March 2006 by Jack Dorsey, Noah Glass, Biz Stone, and Evan Williams and launched in July of that year. Twitter is an American online news and social networking service on which users post and interact with messages known as “tweets”. Tweets were originally restricted to 140 characters, but on November 7, 2017, this limit was doubled for all languages except Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. Registered users can post, like, and retweet tweets, but unregistered users can only read them.
Instagram is a photo and video-sharing social networking service owned by Facebook, Inc. It was created by Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, and launched in October 2010 exclusively on iOS. The app allows users to upload photos and videos to the service, which can be edited with various filters, and organized with tags and location information. An account’s posts can be shared publicly or with pre-approved followers.