Today WWW is 25 years old. Those under thirty have known nothing else. Yet we older citizens can remember what it was like before in the internet and before all the conveniences, such as mobile phones and smart phones, that have been spawned in its wake. For us, it is difficult to believe that all this has happened in the space of a quarter of a century. Today, therefore, is a significant one, not least for WWW’s daddy, Sir Tim Berners-Lee.
This morning The Telegraph features our favourite twenty-something in its how-the-web-was-born feature:
Berners-Lee had to start from scratch and build all the infrastructure. He wrote the HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP) to outline how information would be transmitted between computers, HyperText Markup Language (HTML) to create web pages, the very first web browser called WorldWideWeb and the first HTTP and web server software.
He also wrote the very first web page to ever exist, which simply described his work on the project and how others could create a website. It was hosted on Berners-Lee’s own NeXT computer in his office, with a sticky label on the front saying: “This machine is a server. DO NOT POWER DOWN!”.