It was 20 years ago today Berner-Lee taught the ‘net to play…

On Christmas Day 1990 Tim Berners-Lee made the first successful connection to a web server, setting us on the path that got us to where we are today. The proposal he made to CERN is still available online today at W3.org.

It took a while for this new technology to really take off. Other technologies like gopher servers provided a nice hierarchical structure for people to distribute their information in. Pesonally, I set up my first web servers a year or two later. One was for the WWW Virtual Library’s geography section and the other was for the International Council on Monuments and Sites, who had been running a gopher server for a couple of years.

In the early days, websites looked much different than today’s sites. Images were the exception rather than the norm and things like Flash and PHP didn’t exist. People were genuinely concerned by bandwidth because many users had dialup connections and didn’t use graphical interfaces. Since then websites have become much more advanced, with Flash-based graphics, cascading stylesheets (CSS) and tons of graphics everywhere.

Tim Berners-Lee was knighted in 2003 in recognition of his contributions to the development of the Internet as we know it today.

So, happy birthday, World Wide Web! It seems like just yesterday that you appeared on the scene.