Wikipedia, Yahoo, YouTube, Myspace, Google, Amazon, BBC in their early days – On March 12, 1989, the "unknown" Tim Berners-Lee presented at CERN a paper that was to change the future of cyberspace
It seems like a whole century, but it's only a quarter of a century.
Today, the World Wide Web (WWW) turns 25 years old, as on March 12, 1989, the unknown - and later Sir - British computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee, then working at CERN, suddenly presented in a landmark technical paper his idea for a new, easy way for Internet users to access files and web pages.
That date is considered the birth of the Web. The Internet may have already been created several years earlier, but it was only when it was combined with the World Wide Web that the way was opened for the global phenomenon of the Internet as we know it today.
Berners-Lee's idea, which bore the unimpressive title "proposal for information management", was then considered rather too bold and was not given due importance, with the result that it was initially ignored by his colleagues at CERN, although it was later (reluctantly) implemented.
It was, after all, a time when other alternative online networking systems, such as the American Compuserve and Gopher or the French Minitel, were competing to gain the interest of users (but they were paid, while Berners-Lee's was free). In reality, however, probably no one could have predicted that the British researcher's system would ultimately win the fiercely competitive "race".
However, at Christmas 1990, the British researcher made public the programming code for his proposal, leading in 1993 to the appearance of Mosaic (predecessor to Netscape, which appeared in 1994), the first browser program for navigating the Internet, with which the Web began to become popular. The then US government, with Vice President Al Gore as its main instigator, gave its crucial support to the new Web system, according to the Agence France-Presse, and this played a decisive role in its consolidation in the US and internationally, after 1993.
In 1995, Microsoft released the first Internet Explorer and today approximately 2.7 billion people on Earth (about 40% of the world's population) are connected to the Internet, taking advantage of the great potential of the Web.
The foundations for the Internet as a network of interconnected computers were laid in 1969 with the creation - essentially by the US military - of the ARPAnet network. Today, it is difficult for anyone - young or old - to imagine their life without the Internet. However, not all regimes on the planet see it in the same positive light, which is why the battle for the truly global dominance of the Internet is not really over.
On the occasion of the "birthday" of the World Wide Web, the British Independent presents photos from when some of the world's most beloved websites were still... infants.
In this photographic material we see, among other things, "childish images" of Wikipedia, Yahoo, YouTube, Myspace, Google, Amazon, BBC, etc.
See the photos:
Source: protothema.gr
