It's now so commonplace that people don't bother mentioning the "WWW" part of a web address anymore.
When someone does say "double-yew, double-yew, double-yew" (or "dubya" from a Texan), it's just annoying, so old-school. But lest we forget, that "WWW" part is the Web. And today marks the 25th anniversary of public access to the World Wide Web.
The actual invention if the Web was in 1989, but it took until August 23, 1991 before it was released by its inventor to the general public.
It is, of course, Sir Tim Berners-Lee who invented the Web.
At the time, he was working as a software engineer at CERN, where scientists from all around the world came to use its huge accelerators. These scientists had a great deal of difficulty sharing information since they were working on disparate systems without a common interface. As Sir Tim said: "Well, I found it frustrating that in those days, there was different information on different computers, but you had to log on to different computers to get at it. Also, sometimes you had to learn a different program on each computer. So finding out how things worked was really difficult. Often it was just easier to go and ask people when they were having coffee..."
Berners-Lee saw a solution to this problem by making use of the Internet -- which by then already had millions of computers connected through it -- using an emerging technology called hypertext. In March 1989, he produced a document called “Information Management: A Proposal” which set out his vision fot the as-yet-unnamed Web. It met with mild enthusiasm and never became an official CERN project, but he was given time to work on it.
This work produced the three fundamental technologies that remain the foundation of today’s Web:
- HTML: HyperText Markup Language
- URI: Uniform Resource Identifier
- HTTP: Hypertext Transfer Protocol
The very first website has been restored and you can browse it here, at its original address: http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html.
It was Berners-Lee who was the prime advocate of making the underlying code royalty-free, for ever. As he said: “Had the technology been proprietary, and in my total control, it would probably not have taken off. You can’t propose that something be a universal space and at the same time keep control of it.”
It was a great gift to the world. Sir Tim himself never derived great riches from it. But the world is much, much richer for it.
So next time you have to type out "WWW", give a hat tip to Sir Tim.
