WWW turns 20

The World Wide Web, more commonly known as the "Web," turns 20 today. To celebrate the twentieth birthday of the www today, a ceremony was held at CERN in Geneva, where it was invented. One of its creators, the English researcher Tim Berners-Lee, was also present. Berners-Lee, together with the Belgian physicist Robert Cailliau, created the HTTP protocol for which he wrote the first server and the first client, the historic browser called WorldWideWeb. He also wrote the first version of the hyperlink-capable document formatting language known as HTML.

It was March 13, 1989, a Monday, when Berners-Lee submitted to his superior, Mike Sendall, a project regarding a new information management system, aimed at networking scientists at the Geneva center and their colleagues around the world. "A little vague, but promising," Sendall noted in the document, but authorized Berners-Lee to continue the work. In September 1990, the researcher received a NeXT Cube computer, with which, the following December, he developed the Web (NB: the Web, not the Internet).

If the Web no longer has anything to do with the information system that at its inception connected only a small group of computers at the research center, "its roots will forever be linked to CERN," Berners-Lee noted during today's ceremony, during which the British researcher gave a demonstration with the original browser. "The creative spirit that allowed Tim Berners-Lee to invent the Web is still alive at CERN," assured the director general of the Geneva research center, Rolf Heuer.

In the image (click to enlarge): the historic browser running on the NeXT Unix system. And it's only because it was invented at CERN and runs on Unix that the web is based on free protocols today, because if it had been created by IBM, Microsoft, or Apple, we would be paying dearly for every click today. Remember this well.

Some might argue that we already pay for internet. No! We pay for a line, just like we used to pay for a landline. You, on the other hand, are reading this article free of charge (and you can even download it), just as you pay nothing to access many other sites.
If, however, the internet had been created by a commercial entity, you'd only see a nice list of articles with a short description, and you'd have to pay to read them.
The only sites you could perhaps access free of charge would be those that sell things, like Amazon and the like.

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