Five years ago, James Gillie, director of communications at CERN, the European Laboratory for Particle Physics in Switzerland, wrote on the BBC that the World Wide Web has several birthdays.
One is in March 1989, when the Briton Tim Berners-Lee, now Sir Berners-Lee, known as the inventor of the Web, delivered to his superior a proposal to information management that traced the foundations of what would become the Web: documents, connected by hypertext, which could be accessed via a computer network such as the Internet, which was then used primarily in academia. A second anniversary would be around Christmas 1990 when Berners-Lee finalized the proposal and concluded the first server, browser and web pages, using a NeXT computer, created by the company founded by Steve Jobs, who left Apple a few years ago.
“But perhaps the most important birthday of all is that of April 30, 1993,” wrote Gillie. Exactly 20 years ago, CERN released for free use, the technology invented by Berners-Lee (another option would have been, for example, patent it and charge for use). In the following years – especially with the push of sites and companies that emerged from the other side of the Atlantic – the Web massified up and became a crucial mechanism in the expansion and adoption of the Internet.
To celebrate this twentieth anniversary, CERN put online , the original address, the first site of the world, in a 1993 version, the earliest he could find. The set of pages that explains what the Web, including historical notes, a page about the people involved (Berners-Lee worked with several other scientists, including the Belgian Robert Cailliau, the first tech enthusiast), technical details and a section to explain how they could help Web users to grow. There was also an email address to anyone who would communicate bugs found.
In late 1993, according to CERN, there were more than 500 servers and traffic Web pages represented 1% of all data circulating on the Internet. The institution also used the address to launch a unique site on the history of Web