Thursday, May 16, 2013

Happy (slightly belated) 20th Birthday, WorldWideWeb!

The WWW celebrated it's 20th birthday on April 30, 2013, 20 years after it was officially launched in 1993. It's hard to imagine that this lean webpage (below) gave birth to the internet as we know it today!

World Wide Web

The WorldWideWeb (W3) is a wide-area hypermedia information retrieval initiative aiming to give universal access to a large universe of documents.

Everything there is online about W3 is linked directly or indirectly to this document, including an executive summary of the project, Mailing lists , Policy , November's W3 news , Frequently Asked Questions .

What's out there?
Pointers to the world's online information, subjects , W3 servers, etc.
Help
on the browser you are using
Software Products
A list of W3 project components and their current state. (e.g. Line Mode ,X11 Viola , NeXTStep , Servers , Tools , Mail robot , Library )
Technical
Details of protocols, formats, program internals etc
Bibliography
Paper documentation on W3 and references.
People
A list of some people involved in the project.
History
A summary of the history of the project.
How can I help ?
If you would like to support the web..
Getting code
Getting the code by anonymous FTP , etc. 
The research lab, CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research), announced that the project they were developing would provide a free and open platform which would connect computers world-wide.  CERN is now trying to preserve the digital assets which are associated with the creation of the web and pulled this page from November 1992.  They believe that this was the first website, though they're hoping to locate an older copy. (W3 was an alternate name for the web, which was eventually abandoned.)

The WorldWideWeb was envisioned as a royalty-free environment, free for anyone to use. By the end of 1993, there were some 500 web servers (which then accounted for 1% of internet traffic), and today, it is estimated that there are some 630 million websites online. Long gone are 300 baud modems and the use of terms such as Archie, Veronica, Jughead, Gopher, telnet, and WAIS.