The World Wide Web’s 25th Anniversary (1989- 2014)

The World Wide Web was “born” March 12th, 1989, when Sir Tim Berners-Lee published a paper proposing this information system, which he later released for free on Christmas Day 1990. In Tim Berners-Lee: The Web Needs Its Freedom, CNN reports on some of the issues that he and others are currently addressing, like: censorship, affordability, availability, freedom from spying and privacy invasion, and other issues. Here’s a snippet from the article:

At 58, Berners-Lee is not taking a back seat. Having invented the Web once, he hopes to re-invent it through the “Web We Want” initiative, aiming to create a universal “Internet Users Bill of Rights.”

Berners-Lee still enjoys enough power over his creation to make big changes realistic, through two authorities he founded and continues to lead. The World Wide Web Consortium (WC3) determines standards for all Web infrastructure, backed by the world’s leading academic institutions and software developers. The Web Foundation manages the spread and ethical application of the Web, bringing pressure to bear on governments through initiatives such as The Web Index, which ranks nations by Internet access standards.

If you’d like to check out a little World Wide Web history, this timeline slideshow by USA Today shows the years when Google, Yahoo, Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and other sites and browsers, started up, including photos of the various developers. These handful of developers have forever changed our world and how we communicate.

I also found it interesting that just a small group of companies are responsible for 300 submarine fiber-optic cables that connect the countries of the world on the Internet. The map of these cables that I used for this article looks like a web, doesn’t it?

Happy Birthday, World Wide Web!

NOTES:

• The Difference between the Internet and the World Wide Web Did you know they aren’t the same?
• The map is available at Telegraphy.com. This map doesn’t include include land-based cables.