Birthday Quote

On the 12th November 1990, Tim Berners-Lee, an independent contractor at CERN, The European Organization for Nuclear Research, wrote a formal proposal to build a "hypertext project" as a "web" of "hypertext documents" to be viewed by "browsers" using a client-server architecture.

This was the birth of what we know as the World Wide Web.

At this point HTML (Hypertext Mark-Up – the language used to write web pages) and HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol – the structure for navigating the web) had already been in development for about two months and the first Web server was about a month from completing its first successful test.

Often mistakenly used as a synonym for 'The Internet', the World Wide Web is a medium of documents and other resources identifiable by Uniform Resource Locators (URLs – or what we commonly refer to as web addresses, such as www.audlem.org) which are made available to us all via the Internet – a global network of physically connected computers.

Berners-Lee's breakthrough was to marry hypertext to the Internet. In his book Weaving The Web, he explains that he had repeatedly suggested that a marriage between the two technologies was possible to members of both technical communities, but when no one took up his invitation, he finally assumed the project himself. In the process, he developed three essential technologies:

• a system of globally unique identifiers for resources on the Web (the URL)
• the publishing language (HTML)
• the protocol to distribute information across the internet (HTTP)

By the end of 1993, three years after its creation, there were 130 individual URLs, or website address, accessible over the World Wide Web. At the time of writing this article there are 1,282,621,741.

"The Web does not just connect machines, it connects people"

Tim Berners-Lee

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