Belated happy 25th anniversary to the World Wide Web. Saturday, August 6, 2016 marked 25 years as a publicly available service. It has changed the lives of millions of people around the world. The World Wide Web was first launched Aug. 23, 1991.
It was British computer scientist Sir Tim Berners-Lee who gave birth to the idea while working at a Swiss physics laboratory in 1989. Berners-Lee worked on his proposal using a NeXT computer, which was one the earliest products created by Steve Jobs.
The first server was launched publicly, two years later, Aug. 6, 1991.
Sir Tim originally developed the web to meet the demand for information-sharing between physicists in universities and institutes around the world.
Other information retrieval systems which used the internet — such as WAIS and Gopher — were available at the time, but the web’s simplicity, along with the fact that the technology was made royalty-free in 1993, led to its rapid adoption and development.
By late 1993, there were more than 500 known web servers, and the World Wide Web accounted for one per cent of internet traffic. Two decades later, there were an estimated 630 million websites online.
The first web page was created by Tim-Berners Lee, a British scientist at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, located on the French-Swiss border near Geneva. The page went live at CERN Dec. 20, 1990, and was opened up to the high-energy physics community Jan. 10, 1991. But it wasn’t until August of that year that Berners-Lee made the project public by posting a summary of it on several online forums, lastly on Aug. 22.
HTML code and URLs were created by October 1990.
The rest, as they say, is history.
If you would like to submit a question or suggest a topic for future column consideration, please email your question to: info.vpcuc@gmail.com
There will be no monthly meeting for the month of January. The next meeting of the Vernon PC Users’ Club will be Feb. 14 at 7 p.m. in the cafeteria at the Schubert Centre.
We start off every meeting with a ‘TANSQ” session. Come see what we’re all about!
Call Betty at 250-542-7024 or Grace at 250-549-4318 for more information.
