Skip to main content

30 Years


No, I’m not talking about Taylor Swift’s birthday, I’m referring to the 30th anniversary of the World Wide Web. I know, it seems like only yesterday Tim Berners-Lee’s creation was first introduced to the world, and forever changed the way we shared and organised information. Forget waiting for the promised ASI Singularity, this was the last one, and anyone who claims they could see how this would change the face of human society is a liar.

In March 1989 at CERN in Switzerland, Berners-Lee wrote and submitted this proposal for a new way of managing the huge amount of information the research facility generated. He was concerned with the lack of comprehensive documentation for projects, as well as the lack of information retention as people came and left when projects concluded. With the LHC project looming large in their immediate future, keeping track of all the data was becoming a concern. The idea of hypertext and hypermedia had been floating around for a while, but no-one could really find a way to make good use of it. Even while trying to focus largely on text, Berners-Lee already understood that whatever his project ended up with, it would eventually have to support at least graphics if not other media.

20 months later, and WorldWideWeb became available to the staff at CERN, promising to transform the way people interacted and retrieved information. From there, of course, the whole thing exploded and continued development and was let loose into the wilds of the Internet, digiforming the digital ether into the cyberspace we know and are addicted to now.

I’ve made this a short post because there’s no point in me playing historian when the job has been done for me. A bunch of devs and designers descended on CERN and have charted the journey that began with the Information Management proposal, and hasn’t really ended. They’ve even managed to create the original browser, and make it work within your browser. All of this you can find here, and you would be remiss to not take a look.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The Alphabet Soup: A Quick Guide to Post-Nominals

This week, I’ll walk you through the ever-growing list of post-nominal letters you can add to your name through qualifications and certifications. Being a student myself, I’ll start with exploring the academic route, then go through the more popular, and best recognised, vendor and standards organisations’ certifications, highlighting their worth for your CV and career development. It’s not a comprehensive list, by any stretch of the imagination, and is geared towards a more general CyberSec professional, rather than focusing on any one aspect of the industry. I’ll try and shy away from too much debate by running away very quickly to avoid the one about CEH vs. OSCP, and leave it to you instead. *Disclaimer* I am a university student, and haven’t actually done any of the following certifications, at least not to completion. I have explored each in a reasonable amount of depth to see their benefits and worth and consulted with holders of a few to gain their insider opinions. I a...

The Ancient and Venerable Art of Google-fu

Other titles considered for this post: How Not To Piss Off Entire Forums and Facebook Groups; Avoiding the Banhammer; Stop Being Lazy and Look it Up Yourselves. Before you can embark on a career in, well, anything even vaguely IT related (or do practically anything), you must master one crucial skill: information searching. In the days of yore, and even rumoured to still exist despite budget cuts, there were in of cult of specialists in this area, who guarded their domains jealously: the librarians. These knowledge-fanatics could divine what you were looking for from the ridiculously poor and mumbled explanation you gave them, then translated that into a secretive code which led you to a shelf in a library, and then to the book you were after. Just like magic. These days, while librarians are still a vitally important part of cataloguing knowledge, we also have another, less mystical, tool at our fingertips: the Search Engine. Unfortunately, very few people have bothered to le...

Logical Fallacies - Why do they matter?

I came across a wonderful poster image by a talented artist, Michele Rosenthal , which depicts a robot debate: Granted, these aren't all the logical fallacies that exist, but it covers the most obvious, and most abused ones. But why are they important? We currently live in an age where we have access to more information that at any other point in history, and yet somehow we still think that arguing from emotion, or with our cognitive dissonance blinders on, is both right and acceptable: it isn't, not by any stretch of the imagination. Postmodernism may have a place, but not here. Yes, you absolutely are allowed to feel they way you want to, but debates are places for facts and ideas that need to be scrutinised rigorously, not with playground threats and character assassinations. "I feel" is not an argument that belongs in a debate - your feelings are valid for you, yes, but you can not simply refute the evidence-based assertion of vaccinations work with the st...