It’s a big day today. 25 years ago to this very day – August 23, 1991 – new users were able to get online and access the World Wide Web. It’s now commonly celebrated as the internet’s birthday and usually referred to as Internaut Day. As many of you might be aware the World Wide Web was designed and deployed by computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee at CERN in Switzerland. In just 25 years the internet has revolutionized the way we conduct business and interact with each other.
The man affectionately referred to as the father of the internet first created a personal database of people and software models at CERN back in 1980. He used hypertext in which each page was linked to an already existing page.
This system was developed further over the next dead and in 1989 he proposed “a universal linked information system” which would help physicists work together. In the following year, he built the HyperText Transfer Protocol aka HTTP, the Uniform Resource Identifier or URL, the HyperText Markup Language or HTML aside from the first web browser, server, and web pages.
On August 6th, 1991 the first web page went online which can still be accessed through its original URL. At that point it was limited to users at CERN, however, on August 23rd, folks outside of CERN were invited to join the web, and the rest, as they say, is history.