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Happy 25th birthday to the World Wide Web (Check Out World’s First Website)

#On this day 25 years ago, August 23, 1991, the world’s first website went live to the public from a lab in the Swiss Alps.

So Happy 25th Birthday, WWW! It’s the Silver Jubilee of the world’s first website.

#The site was created by Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the father of the World Wide Web (WWW), and was dedicated to information on the World Wide Web project.

Then in 1993 CERN announced it would make the code for the web royalty-free, forever.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee, Web Inventor and Founding Director of the World Wide Web

The inventor of the World Wide Web and one of Time Magazine’s ‘100 Most Important People of the 20th Century’, Sir Tim Berners-Lee is a scientist and academic whose visionary and innovative work has transformed almost every aspect of our lives.

Having invented the Web in 1989 while working at CERN and subsequently working to ensure it was made freely available to all, Berners-Lee is now dedicated to enhancing and protecting the Web’s future. He is a Founding Director of the World Wide Web Foundation, which seeks to ensure the Web serves humanity by establishing it as a global public good and a basic right. He is also Director of the World Wide Web Consortium, a global Web standards organization he founded in 1994 to lead the Web to its full potential. In 2012 he co-founded the Open Data Institute (ODI) which advocates for Open Data in the UK and globally. Sir Tim has advised a number of governments and corporations on ongoing digital strategies. A graduate of Oxford University, Sir Tim presently holds academic posts at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology at CSAIL (Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab), (USA) and the University of Southampton (UK.)

Steve Jobs Inadvertently Helped Create The World Wide Web

Tim Berners-Lee conceived the World Wide Web while working as a software engineer at CERN.

He was trying to solve a problem that many others had tried and failed to solve, he explained during a recent an interview at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.
Scientists would come to the CERN research center from all over the world, bringing their own computers that used all sorts of operating systems and software. One scientist couldn’t find or access another’s research.
But then Berners-Lee noticed:

“ALL THESE SYSTEMS LOOKED DIFFERENT BUT IN FACT YOU’RE READING STUFF ON A SCREEN AND SOMETIMES CLICKING ON BITS. SO YOU COULD IMAGINE A THIN LAYER WHICH WOULD MAP ALL THESE EXISTING SYSTEMS INTO ONE VIRTUAL SYSTEM. WOULDN’T THAT BE COOL?”

He sent the idea to his boss, Mike Sendall, and got Sendall’s now famous response: ‘Vague, but exciting.’ He agreed to let Berners-Lee work on it in his spare time. But he did let Berners-Lee buy a special computer for the project, he told the audience at Rensselaer:

“WE BOUGHT A COOL MACHINE, THE NEXT COMPUTER. NEXT WAS A MACHINE MADE BY STEVE JOBS WHEN HE WAS KICKED OUT OF APPLE … IT HAD A WONDERFUL SPIRIT TO IT, A REALLY GOOD DEVELOPER’S ENVIRONMENT … WHEN YOU OPENED IT, YOU GOT A PRE-RECORDED MESSAGE FROM STEVE THAT SAID, ‘WELCOME TO THE NEXT. THIS IS NOT ABOUT PERSONAL COMPUTING. IT’S ABOUT ‘INTER-PERSONAL’ COMPUTING.’ IT WAS PERFECT FOR DESIGNING THE WEB.”