The 25th anniversary of the world wide web is being marked today, a quarter of a century since it was first proposed in 1989 by British computer scientist Sir Tim Berners-Lee.
For anybody under the age of 20 it is hard to imagine what life would be like without the web, which is not to be confused with the internet – a massive chain of networks, which the web uses.
But when Sir Tim first submitted his idea while working at Swiss physics laboratory, Cern, the response from his boss was the brief: “Vague, but exciting.”
He went on to develop an invention that has revolutionised the lives of billions, with two out of five people in the world now connected.
Based on his earlier program for storing information called Enquire, it was designed to allow people to work together by combining their knowledge in a web of hypertext documents.
Sir Tim wrote the first world wide web server, ‘httpd’, and the first client ‘WorldWideWeb’, a what-you-see-is-what-you-get hypertext browser/editor.
It launched publicly just two-and-a-half years later, on August 6, 1991.
Physics graduate 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 are an estimated 630 million websites online.
In 2009 Sir Tim founded the World Wide Web Foundation which has a mission statement to “establish the open web as a global public good and a basic right, ensuring that everyone can access and use it freely”.
Its Web Index, first launched in 2012, measures how well different countries around the world are harnessing the benefits of an open and universal web, and last year he spoke of it having highlighted how the internet and social media were being used to expose wrongdoing in the world – leaving some governments threatened.
Speaking in November, he said: “One of the most encouraging findings of this year’s Web Index is how the web and social media are increasingly spurring people to organise, take action and try to expose wrongdoing in every region of the world.
“But some governments are threatened by this, and a growing tide of surveillance and censorship now threatens the future of democracy.
“Bold steps are needed now to protect our fundamental rights to privacy and freedom of opinion and association online.”
That month he also said he backed whistleblowers such as former US intelligence operative Edward Snowden who use the internet to “protect society’s interests”.
Last year Sir Tim was jointly awarded the inaugural £1 million Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering along with fellow internet pioneers Robert Kahn, Vint Cerf, Marc Andreessen and Louis Pouzin.
Timeline of web’s development
It seems such a modern invention but the World Wide Web can trace its foundation back to before the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War.
1989
March 12: Tim Berners-Lee, a British scientist working at Cern in Switzerland, submits a proposal for a “distributed information system” to allow researchers to deal with huge amounts of information generated by complex physics experiments. This is the genesis of the World Wide Web – spelt as three words.
1990
December 20: The world’s first website goes live at Info.cern.ch. The first web page is http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html .
Larry Page (left) and Sergey Brin, co-founders of search giant Google.1991
August 6: The World Wide Web is launched publicly as Berners-Lee publishes details of the project on the internet.
1993
April 30: Cern releases the World Wide Web source code and announces it will be available free of charge. It also releases a basic browser along with a library of code. By the end of the year there are more than 500 web servers, and the web accounts for one per cent of internet traffic.
1994
May 25-27: The First International World-Wide Web conference is held at Cern. It is hailed as the ‘Woodstock of the web’.
December: By the end of the year, there are 10,000 servers, 2,000 of them commercial. There are 10 million users, with traffic, according to Cern, equivalent to shipping the collected works of Shakespeare every second.
Jeff Bezos, 50, founder and CEO of the online shopping site Amazon.1995
July 16: Jeff Bezos launches Amazon.com as an online bookshop from computers in his garage in Seattle, Washington. It is now the world’s largest online retailer.
August 16: Microsoft launches first version of its Internet Explorer web browser, which would come to dominate the market as part of its Windows platform.
1997
September 15: Google.com is registered as a web domain by Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Today, Google Inc. is the second largest company in the US, with a market value of around $395 billion, only surpassed by Apple ($465 billion).
2000
January: The DotCom Boom reaches its peak. The previous few years had seen a rush to invest in online firms, from retail to internet service providers (ISPs). Share prices soared. It culminated in ISP AOL buying traditional media company Time Warner for almost $200 billion.
March: DotCom Crash – the bubble bursts because few of the firms that were invested in made any money. Investors lose millions. By October 2002, exacerbated by the effect of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the technology-focused Nasdaq stock index had fallen by 78 per cent.
2004
February: Harvard psychology student Mark Zuckerberg launches Facebook with his college roommates to connect students at the university. It was rolled out to the public in 2006 and as of January 2014 it has about 1.2 billion monthly users. It floated on the Nasdaq stock exchange last October.
Pierre Omidyar, founder and chairman of eBay.2005
November: A new video-hosting website called You Tube is launched. Taking advantage of increasing internet connection speeds it allows users to upload their own under-generated content. Today, according to the company, a billion people watch more than six billion hours of video in 61 languages every month, and 100 hours of footage is uploaded every minute.
2006
March: Twitter Inc. is created by Jack Dorsey, Evan Williams, Biz Stone and Noah Glass as “a text message service that allowed users to quickly communicate with a small group”. The first tweet is sent by @Jack on March 21. Today it is a social media giant with almost 650 million active users around the world.
2007
January 9: Apple launch the iPhone. It revolutionises mobile web-surfing with a handset that features a large touch screen and a mobile-friendly version of its Safari web browser, and spawns the world of apps.
2008
July 10: Apple launches the App Store.
2010
April 23: Apple launches the iPad, the world’s first tablet, taking the web off in yet another mobile direction.
October: Picture editing and sharing website Instagram launched. Less than two years later, in April 2012, it was sold to Facebook for $1 billion.
Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook Inc.2014
February 20: Facebook pays $19 billion for mobile phone messaging system WhatsApp, which was created in 2009 by two former Yahoo! employees and now has more than 450 million active users.
See also: A springboard to fame