Happy birthday! WWW

Our blog wouldn’t be here today without the World Wide Web.

And the Web wouldn’t be here without Tim Berners-Lee, a British software consultant who was looking for a way to track associations between pieces of information using a computer (much like a thesaurus does manually). His initial program for doing this was called ‘Enquire’, developed in the 1980s. He subsequently developed the idea, and the standards, to allow the sharing of data across the Internet. He created HTML as the standard method for coding web content, designed an addressing scheme (contained in the URL) for locating web content, and created HTTP as the protocol for transferring web content across the Internet.

A screen-shot of the first web browser shows how radically things have changed. Maybe Berners-Lee never expected his actions to have such an impact on socio-economic development but they certainly have: we wouldn’t be blogging today without those initial first steps!

Here’s to many more years of the Internet, its descendants, and safe and productive surfing!