millsworks

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!