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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.

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