The world wide web has quietly passed its 15th
anniversary.
The web began as a project dubbed ENQUIRE, started by Sir Tim
Berners-Lee in 1989 at the CERN physics laboratory on the France
Switzerland border.
The project aimed to help researchers share information across
computers, using the concept of hypertext links.
Links to the code behind the web were first posted to the
alt.hypertext discussion board in August 1991. The first website
went online later that year.
In 1993, CERN declared that the world wide web would be free for
use by anyone. The html web page programming language was released
the same year.
But despite the 15-year anniversary, Berners-Lee told this
year’s World Wide Web Conference in Edinburgh that these are still
early days. “We are at the embryonic stages of the web. The web is
going to be more revolutionary,” he said.
He predicted “a huge amount of change to come” highlighting
recent developments such as the Google search algorithm, the
blogging online diary phenomenon and collaborative wikis.
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