Tuesday, September 24

The launch of World Wid Wed (WWW) to the public

El internet cambió al mundo.
The internet changed the world.

Photo: TIMOTHY A. CLARY / AFP / Getty Images

Originally called Mesh, the browser he named WorldWideWeb became the first easy-to-use, royalty-free means of browsing for the emerging information network that became the Internet as we know it today.

Berners -Lee was a member of CERN, the Swiss-based research organization, and other research institutions such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Stanford University had developed complex systems to share information internally, and Berners-Lee sought a means to connect the CERN system with others.

Tim Berners-Lee (center) , inventor of the Web, Ben Segal (left), mentor and computer scientist at CERN, and Robert Cailliau (right) (SEBASTIAN DERUNGS/AFP via Getty Images)

Outlined a plan for such a network in 1989 and developed it over the years following. The computer he used, a NeXT desktop, became the world’s first Internet server.

Berners-Lee wrote and published the first web page, a simplistic outline of the WorldWideWeb project, at 1991.

CERN began to share access with other institutions and soon opened it to the general public. By releasing the project’s source code into the public domain two years later, Berners-Lee essentially opened up access to the project to anyone in the world, making it free and ( relatively) easy to explore the nascent Internet.

Simple web browsers like Mosaic they appeared shortly after, and before long, the web had become by far the most popular system of its kind.

BEIRUT, LEBANON – FEBRUARY 6: A Beirut sandwich shop doubles as an internet cafe in Beirut on 04 February. The internet frenzy has hit the Lebanese capital so badly, with a third of Middle Eastern net users in the small country, that internet cafes are opening in unlikely places, including kebab shops, to meet demand. (OUSAMA AYOUB/AFP via Getty Images)

Within a matter of years, Berners-Lee’s invention had revolutionized the exchange of information and, in doing so, had drastically altered the way humans communicated.

The creation and globalization of the web is widely regarded as one of the most transformative events in human history.

It is estimated that 4390 Millions of people use the Internet, representing more than half of the world’s population. The American average now passes hours per week online.

A visitor to a computer showroom uses an Internet software interface to view a computer show site. World Wide Web (WWW) on September 1996 in Beijing. (ROBYN BECK/AFP via Getty Images)

The rise of the Internet has been the greatest expansion in access to information in the history of mankind, has led to the exponential growth of the total amount of data in the world and has facilitated the dissemination of knowledge.

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