World Wide Web is only 30 years old, which makes it even younger than the internet itself.
Popularly known as web, was invented by Sir Tim Berners –Lee, a British computer scientist. Right from his childhood, Sir Berners had a knack for computers as both of his parents were computer scientists, working on the earliest computers.
So we can say that the story or history of the World Wide Web is connected with the story of Sir Tim Berners Lee.
(Courtesy: BT.com)It was at a very early age itself that Berners’ love for electronics surpassed his love for railways and he ended up making a computer from an old television.
Berners Lee was a graduate from Oxford University when he started working for CERN, a physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland. It was while working in this laboratory that Berners noted the difficulties people face in sharing the information, even after the invention of the Internet.
(Courtesy: The Costa Rica News)So what Berners did was to take the function of the internet one step ahead. Internet was used to connect different computers, and Berners thought of developing a technology through which these connected computers could share information. This technology was Hypertext.
In 1989, Tim Berners documented a proposal for the web, which was called “Information Management: A Proposal”. It was, however, not readily accepted and was called “vague but exciting”. But the proposal was enough to convince Tim’s boss to give him some time from work to develop this technology.
The computer he used for this task was the NeXT computer of Steve Jobs.
In just one year, Berners was able to write the basic fundamentals of the technology, which to this date remain the essential components of the World Wide Web. These are HTML (Hypertext Markup Language), the formatting language of the World Wide Web; URI (Uniform Resource Identifier), the unique address on the web; and HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol).
The first web browser that Tim wrote was “WorldWideWeb.app” and the first web server brought by him was “httpd”.
After the World Wide Web was served to the people outside CERN and it started being used widely, Tim thought of making the service royalty free. He used to maintain that a universal space like WWW can’t be in control of anyone. He knew that the true potential of the technology would only be realized when the users cease to pay a fee for the service.
(Courtesy: home.bt.com)The thought was embraced with open arms everywhere and it was then that the World Wide Web saw the real light of the day. A new wave of innovation and creativity was sweeping the universal space and everyone was positive about this new technology.
Another benchmark was set up when Tim Berners set up W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) at Massachusetts. This is an international community which develops open web standards. In 2009 was introduced the World Wide Web Foundation by Berners which has helped a new culture of sharing information to thrive on the internet.