Glyn Moody was Computer Weekly’s first web
columnist. Here he recounts the key events in the webs 20 year
history.
Although Tim Berners-Lee made his
“Information Management”
proposal back in March 1989, the key moment for what became the
World Wide Web was October 1994, when the start-up Mosaic
Communications – later known as Netscape – released its browser,
optimised for PC users and dial-up modems.
Netscape turned the Web into a mass medium, and invented a new
business model by giving away its main product. It confirmed its
position as the first significant Internet company with a hugely
successful IPO in August 1995 – and guaranteed that Microsoft,
hitherto sceptical about the Internet, would place it at the heart
of its strategy.
The first sign of this was Internet Explorer, originally a
rather feeble add-on to Windows 95. As Microsoft honed its
product, Netscape lost its way – and its market share – until it
took the unprecedented step of opening up its browser code, in
1998.
The Mozilla project gave a huge boost to open source, and led
ultimately to Firefox, now gradually regaining Netscape's lost
browser crown.
Microsoft dominance
Microsoft's dominance of the Web and its standards was held in
check by another free program, Apache, the leading Web server
almost from the moment it was introduced in 1995.
But as VC money flowed into e-commerce, following in the wake of
pioneers like Amazon and eBay, it was Sun's costly Web servers that
became one of the hallmarks of the dotcom delirium.
Bizarrely, it was thought that the key to success was to build
up a large user base first, and worry about money later. This
produced companies like Boo.com, Pets.com and Webvan, which
collectively burned through billions of dollars of funding before
collapsing in the dotcom crash after 2000.
Another company that amassed a huge following but no profit was
the file-sharing site Napster - a missed opportunity for the music
industry, which chose to destroy rather than build on its
innovative P2P distribution system.
Dotcom death
As the dotcom dinosaurs died out, the Web mammals emerged: sites
like Blogger, Wikipedia, del.icio.us, Flickr, MySpace, Facebook and
Twitter. Typically, they were built on commodity hardware and open
source software – one of the most important consequences of the
Internet – which allowed them to scale while keeping costs low.
They were based on social interaction and sharing user-generated
content - not on selling stuff.
The quintessential Web 2.0 company is Google, running today on
more than a million GNU/Linux servers.
There had been Web search engines before, such as WebCrawler,
Lycos and Altavista; what set Google apart was its ranking system,
based on users' links – and its ambition.
As it began sifting through online images, videos (boosted by
the acquisition of YouTube in 2006), journals and blogs, Google
soon became the Web's unofficial index.
At the same time, by offering services like Gmail and Google
Docs through the browser – “in the cloud” - it helped transform
Berners-Lee's modest tool for CERN into a global computing platform
for the 21st Century.
Glyn Moody can be
followed on Twitter.