How was the Internet born? the World Wide Web Revolution

By the end of the 1980s, ARPANET had expanded its nodes overseas and, through the TCP / IP protocols, had led to the creation of a vast “network of networks” of global scale: the Internet.

At that point it was necessary to find a way to make the transmission of files and information on the network easy and accessible to all.

This problem was solved on August 6, 1991, the day the World Wide Web was born.

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WWW: How did it all start?

His story began a couple of years earlier.

In 1989 at CERN in Geneva, the British researcher Tim Berners-Lee was struck by how some Italian colleagues transmitted information via the telephone line from one floor to another of the institute.

Before the birth of the Internet, the World Wide Web was only the description of a system for managing the large amount of information linked to the scientific experiments at CERN among the approximately 17,000 scientists who worked there.

Its name was not yet World Wide Web but MESH.

In 1990, Time Berners-Lee and his collaborators published the first web page at http://info.cern.ch/

The first server on the web was hosted on Berners-Lee’s computer, a NeXT (the company founded by Steve Jobs after leaving Apple) on which a large label was affixed that said “don’t shut down, it’s a server!”.

Things continued to develop rapidly.

In March 1991 the software needed to use the World Wide Web system (the first browser, in fact) was also available to other people at CERN and in August of that year Berners-Lee publicly announced his invention.

 

The web: how has it revolutionized our lives?

What has been the impact of the web on our lives?

The Web was born as part of research and remained there until 1993, the year in which CERN decided to make the WWW available to everyone, releasing the source code in the public domain.

The expansion of the Web continues and gradually transforms itself from a publication tool, into a tool for cultural, political and economic emancipation, alongside and, in some cases, replacing the role of other media.

Today, the Web is a phenomenon that involves nearly five billion people and is part of the collective imagination, so much so that it has become the focal point of cinema, television and other arts.

 

The web: what future?

We talked about history and the past, but what evolution of the web will we see?

The world of the World Wide Web has slowly entered our lives and will continue to be more and more pervasive: expansion continues at an impressive pace, technology is constantly looking for new solutions to increase its potential, and discussions about ethics, rights and equality have reached political tables.

If there is a technology, a tool, an App that currently rules all, be sure that sooner or later it will be overcome by something even more innovative: the web is a universe in continuous evolution.

Our heartfelt thanks go to Tim Berners-Lee for creating the open source web and allowing the world to access it for free.