Today, World Wide Web (WWW) completed 30 years of existence. It was invented by Sir Tim Berners-Lee. Notably, when Sir Tim Berners-Lee submitted a proposal titled ‘Information Management: A Proposal’ on this day in 1989 to his boss he received a reply that reads “vague but exciting.”
It is worth mentioning here that Berners-Lee thought this idea with an aim to help his colleagues working at CERN to share information amongst computers. CERN is a nuclear physics laboratory in Switzerland. CERN has also preserved some of the digital assets that are associated with the birth of the web.
The URL to the world’s first website – info.cern.ch – is currently restored and available for the public. CERN managed to look at the first web servers at CERN and managed to preserve some assets from them. The organisation even went through documentation and tried to restore machine names and IP addresses to their original state.
On April 30 1993, CERN published a statement that made World Wide Web technology available on a royalty-free basis. By doing so, the web was allowed to flourish.
In a blog post, CERN said, “When the first website was born, it was probably quite lonely. And with few people having access to browsers – or to web servers so that they could, in turn, publish their own content – it must have taken a visionary leap of faith at the time to see why it was so exciting. The early WWW team, led by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN, had such vision and belief. The fact that they called their technology the World Wide Web hints at the fact that they knew they had something special, something big.”
Google also marked the anniversary of the World Wide Web with an animated Google Doodle. World Wide Web is also known as ‘W3’ and ‘the web’.
In the meantime, Tim Berners-Lee wrote an annual letter on the World Wide Web’s 30th anniversary. Take a look here:
Also Read: WWW Turns 30 – The Universal & Free Information Space That Connected Everything