Thirty years ago, Tim Berners-Lee proposed the basics of the World Wide Web to CERN. Though his original ideas are now over three decades old, they remain the foundation on which the modern web is built. Here’s how the web has changed the world, and how the world may soon change the web.
Right now you’re doing something that wasn’t possible 30 years ago. Not only because websites did not exist, but because the bones which form them were little more than a collection of ideas. HTML, JPEG, CSS, hyperlinks and web addresses had not yet been created, and even the ancient GIF was just a few years old.
What would become known as the World Wide Web started in 1989 as an idea in the head of Tim Berners-Lee, who submitted a proposal to his managers at CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research) for “linked information systems” designed to help the organization keep track of data. The original proposal did not exactly envision the web as we know it today, but it did lay out the basic concepts like a lack of centralized control, hypertext and remote access across networks. Despite its age, the original proposal, which you can still read, provides some insight into how the web functions.
The original proposal was not accepted, but Mr. Berners-Lee did not give up. Instead, he refined his ideas into broadly applicable core concepts like HTML (the language used by web pages), URI (a string which identifies an online resource) and HTTP (a protocol web servers use to communicate).
