Friday, March 13, 2009

WWW turns 20

No it wasn't invented by Al Gore. Instead it was started by a 29 year old programmer that worked at Cern in Geneva named Tim Berners-Lee. Then 2 guys from the University of Illinois named Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina created the first web browser in 1993 and the rest was history.

So Berners-Lee proposed adding "hypertext" to the Cern network, basically embedding software in documents that would point to other related documents. And thus was born the Web, a global communications network that has shaken up industries, created enormous wealth and transformed the way ordinary people live their lives.

"When two years is a typical length of stay, information is constantly being lost," Berners-Lee wrote in his paper proposing a new system for information management. "The technical details of past projects are sometimes lost forever, or only recovered after a detective investigation in an emergency."


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