THIS YEAR MARKS THE 32ND ANNIVERSARY OF THE FIRST WEBSITE

Mon 07 August 2023:

It is now quite simple to open a website and click a link, but that was not the case 32 years ago. To consider how different life was before to the World Wide Web (WWW) may seem rather bizarre. ordering things from the shop, watching movies at the theater, only meeting friends for chats in cafés, or even writing letters or, if you were lucky, making phone calls to people who lived far away.

Although it may be hard to believe now, the internet was not even in its current form 32 years ago. Public websites are not very old, despite earlier development of the internet’s infrastructure.

The story of the internet began in the 1950s. Despite the negative consequences of the war, something useful was produced for the future, and the internet is one of those things. During the Cold War era, scientists and engineers were seeking a way to communicate data between computers. As they contemplated how communication could be maintained in case of hostile attacks, the first seeds of the internet were sown.

Founded in the 1950s in the United States, the internet was developed in the following decades, particularly in the 1960s and 1970s, and it took on the form of today’s internet in the late 1980s.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of WWW, was born in London, Egland, on June 8, 1955. He was 33 years old when he submitted his proposal on March 12, 1989; while working at Europe’s CERN lab, had submitted the ‘Information Management: A Proposal’ to his boss, which we today recognize as the birth of the World Wide Web.

CERN is an enormous nuclear physics laboratory in Switzerland. Firstly, Berners-Lee visualized “a large hypertext database with typed links, “named “Mesh,” to help his colleagues at CERN share information among multiple computers. Berners-Lee’s boss’s first response from his boss was, “Vague but exciting.” Later he gave him time to develop the humble flowchart into a working model, writing the HTML language, the HTTP application, and WorldWideWeb.app, the first Web browser and page editor.

By the year 1991, the external Web servers were up and running. In April 1993, the web was made public. With the launch of Mosaic in November, it started gaining popularity, the first search engine to accept pictures. That transformed the web, making it user-friendly. Later Mosaic was replaced by the likes of Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome. The 2000s is the beginning of wireless internet for all.

On this special day of his revolutionary innovation in media interaction, Tim Berners-Lee appealed for internet users to endeavour to maintain “complete control” of their data. He condemned the growing commodification of personal information and has been on a duty to save his invention from various problems progressively dominating online life, plus misinformation and a lack of data protection.

At Europe’s physics lab CERN, where he first came up with the idea for theweb30 years ago, he told a small group of journalists, “You should have complete control of your data. It’s not oil. It’s not a commodity.” Berners-Lee writes in the letter on TheWebFoundation,

“Today (March 11), 30 years on from my original proposal for an information management system, half theworldis online. It’s a moment to celebrate how far we’ve come, but also an opportunity to reflect on how far we have yet to go.” But he warned, “It has also created an opportunity for scammers, given a voice to those who spread hatred, and made all kinds of crimes easier to commit”. He said, “If we give up on building a betterwebnow, then thewebwill not have failed us. We will have failed theweb.”

SOURCE: INDEPENDENT PRESS AND NEWS AGENCIES

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