Web Birthday

The internet as we know it has profoundly changed all of our lives, but many forget how young it is and how quickly it evolved. The web, or "world wide web" turns 27 years old on December 20. On that date in 1990, British engineer and scientist Tim Berners-Lee, who once made a computer out of an old television set, launched the world's first website, running on a NeXT computer at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Switzerland.

On 30 April 1993 CERN put the World Wide Web software in the public domain. CERN made the next release available with an open license, as a way to maximize its dissemination. Making the software required to run a web server freely available, along with a basic browser, and a library of code, the web quickly flourished to what it is today.


Incidentally, the web neutrality act that was overturned yesterday was just put in place during 2015. Facebook, Google, Twitter, YouTube, Netflix, Amazon, etc., grew and flourished before the government took over the web and the vote to keep the government out of it will not be the end of the world as some pundits will have us believe. Evidence of government control can be found in many other areas, such as post office, student loans, higher education, taxes, healthcare, banking, and more. The internet will not end because the government decided to not be in charge of it.

Five Internet Firsts

Symbolics Inc. registered the first domain name, Symbolics.com, on March 15, 1985, before the real internet was born. Symbolics Inc. grew out of MIT’s Artificial Intelligence lab, and was the first company to make workstation computers.

CERN launched very first website on August 6, 1991. It was a simple page, similar to a Word document with black lettering on a white background with blue hyperlinks. It briefly described project W3, better known now as the World Wide Web.

The first picture ever uploaded to the World Wide Web on July 18, 1992 was a picture of the all-girl comedy group Les Horrible Cernettes. The group was made up of administrative assistants and partners of researchers at The European Organization for Nuclear Research.

A little-known band called Severe Tire Damage, played live on the Internet for the first time on June 24, 1993.

YouTube was registered as a domain on February 14, 2005. On April 23, 2005, Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim posted the first video called 'Me at the zoo'. The 19-second video features Karim standing in front of elephants at the San Diego Zoo, talking about his interest in “really, really, really long trunks.”

Incidentally, the Internet is what you connect to and the Web is how you view it.

Deepweb and Darknet

These two words are often spoken by the news media and we hear them on some TV shows, but they are never explained.

The Deepweb refers to part of the Internet, specifically the world wide web (anything that starts www) that isn't indexed by search engines, and can't be accessed by Google.

The Darknet refers to non-www networks, where users may need separate software to access them. For example, Silk Road and many illicit markets are hosted on Darknet networks like I2P and Tor.

Internet, IP, Web, and URL

The Internet is a collection of computers and cables that form a communications network.

The Web (World Wide Web) is a collection of HTML (web) pages on the Internet. The Web is the user part of the Internet.

The term Interweb is a combination of the words Internet and Web. It is most often used in the context of joking or sarcasm.

A URL (universal resource locator) is synonymous with Internet address.  A URL is usually a combination of code and text, such as 'http://www.google.com', but numbers are also allowed. A URL always starts with a protocol prefix like http://, but most browsers will type those characters for you. URLs are internally converted to IP addresses

IP address (Internet Protocol address), is a unique identifying number given to every device on the Internet. Like a car license plate, an IP address is a special serial number used for identification, such as  208.185.127.40 = www.about.com.

Bottom line, all URLs have an IP address, but not all IP addresses have a URL.

Of Internets and Webs

The Internet had been around for years before the world wide web and is the set of technologies beneath the web which enable the web to exist. The web cannot function without the internet, but the internet can function without the web.

The Internet technically began to exist the way we know it in 1983 when its predecessor, ARPANET began using TCP/IP. Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol is the framework for the internet system of network communication still used today.

Other programs that use the Internet, but have nothing to do with the web are email, Internet Relay Chat, internet messaging programs, newsgroups, BitTorrent, telnet, FTP, etc.

The web was invented by an Englishman, Tim Berners-Lee in 1990 after years of effort. It did not come into wide-spread use for a few years after that. The World Wide Web is made up of servers, which serve the pages and clients, like Firefox, Chrome, and IE which display the pages. Hey man, I'm on the web tweet me.

Father of the Internet

Sir Tim Berners-Lee, born 1955, and inventor of the Web’s software standards in 1989, tends to be fast-paced and nonlinear. He is currently director of the World Wide Web Consortium and a professor at M.I.T.

When asked if he were do it over again today, would he do anything differently, he admitted he might make one change. He would get rid of the double slash “//” after the “http:” in Web addresses. He said the double slash, a programming convention at the time, turned out to not be really necessary. Amazing to think the web is only twenty years old and how much it has changed the world. In fact, the world wide web (WWW) was first mentioned in print in the New York Times in 1993.

Here's a tip, when typing in a site name, just type the name, such as 'shubsthoughts' then hold down the 'ctrl' key and hit 'enter'. Your web browser will fill in the rest for you and send you to the site.