Happy Birthday! Internet reaches 20

Twenty Christmases ago an invention emerged which has been called as influential as the birth of the wheel, the light bulb and the internal combustion engine: the World Wide Web. On 25 December, 1990 the first website was published, marking the first successful communication between a web browser and server via the internet.

Reuters

The Noel exchange between Timothy Berners-Lee, a British computer scientist at Geneva’s CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, and computer scientist Robert Cailliau no doubt ranks with Alexander Graham Bell’s first telephone call of “Watson, come here! I need you!"

Berners-Lee devised the idea of “hypertext”, the concept of linking text to connect information on multiple computers, and was able to create the HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) language, which is the foundation for the World Wide Web. Berners-Lee made the new language simple enough so that it could be used even by those without much computer programming knowledge.

Like other revolutionary moments, the first instance of web surfing forever changed the way everyday people live.

Some 20 percent of the world has regular internet access and the total number of web pages now approaches 14 billion.

As former US president Bill Clinton noted in 1996: “When I took office (in 1993), only high-energy physicists had ever heard of what is called the World Wide Web. Now even my cat has its own page.”