It’s hard to reconcile the passage of time whenever these sort of benchmarks come along. Today marks the 20th anniversary of the inception of the World Wide Web.
A lot of people are jumping around today and shouting: “Happy Birthday, Internet!” – which is wrong. The origins of the Internet stretch back to 1957 with the launch of Sputnik. The internet is as old as me.
Here’s a cool animated video which summarizes the entire history of the internet and the web:
The World Wide Web is a completely different animal altogether. Tim Berners-Lee was the key figure responsible for finally putting together all the pieces of text, images and hyperlinks which created this vast – and exponentially growing – shared mind of the world. It has, within 2 short decades, transformed how we communicate with each other, how we do business, how we conduct our politics, how we see the world and the universe beyond our reach, and how we behave as human beings.
Big stuff.
And – like the growth of the web itself – those responsible for its origins, growth and development are thinking of and crafting the next level of our shared technological future.
Here’s Berners-Lee speaking at the most recent TED Conference about these anticipated developments which will prove to be just as transformative for our world as the web has proven to be over the past 20 years:
Thank you, Tim Berners-Lee.
Happy birthday interwebs!
Cheers.
UPDATE: Bryan left a comment in which he mentions:
I have to add in one man, who worked with Tim at CERN, who was pretty fundamentally involved with the Web as well. Sadly, he gets little of the credit. Robert Cailliau, take a bow.
Thanks, Bryan!
Tags: 1957, arpanet, cern, happy birthday, internet, robbo, sputnick, tim berners-lee, www
I have to add in one man, who worked with Tim at CERN, who was pretty fundamentally involved with the Web as well. Sadly, he gets little of the credit. Robert Cailliau, take a bow. I see he is mentioned briefly in the article entry in SA.
I had the pleasure of meeting him in Las Vegas last year. He gave a great presentation on how it all came together and why. From his perspective, it was originally all about sharing documents with other physicists at CERN-affiliated institutions globally.
And this is really cool. They developed the first prototypes of sharing on Next machines. As a result of that, they missed realizing how “underdeveloped” html was on its own on other machines. With the display postscript of the Next, everything looked beautiful all by itself. All they needed was linking. He showed some samples. The stuff looked better then than it does now.
By the way, he was completely cool with being over-looked. He is a cool dude.
Here is a link to his Wikipedia entry
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Cailliau
Thanks for that, Bryan. There’s always going to be a front person or an attributable face for any major endeavour. We seem to demand such things – being wired as the silly monkeys we are.
Vint Cerf is certainly another prominent figure most easily recognized among the group of lesser known but equally vital individuals who have contributed to the inception of the net we know today. There are a number of good documentary articles, books, films and videos out there that are assembling the various interconnected histories of the beginnings and growth of the net and web – but there has yet to be any definitive version; perhaps because the history of the net is stil being played out in real time all around us.
When (not if) Berners-Lee’s vision of a data-linked web comes to pass – along with Kelly’s concept of the One Mind – perhaps then we will see these disparate sources of information coalesce into a grand (and accurate) picture of how we got from there to here and beyond.
Cheers.