How old is the internet

The World Wide Web is a universally accepted way of accessing the internet. The web as we know it was first formalized as a plan by Tim Berners-Lee, when he was barely over 30 himself. The year was , and Berners-Lee, a former trainspotter turned physicist turned self-taught computer scientist, was working at CERN, the famed particle physics lab in Switzerland, as a computer research fellow. Email and newsgroups were both well-established. Hell, video games had been around The first video game looked like this.

But there was no integrated system for how to easily write, transmit, and store interconnected information across computers in an organized way.

There was no streamlined system for how to put information on a server and then allow all computer users in a network to easily access it.

In the proposal, Berners-Lee modestly spoke of wanting to use hypertext, a. This is how he first conceptualized the concept of a browser receiving information from a server:. And just like that, the internet was born. So basically, this guy invented the way that we access and consume information on the internet.

Wondering what the very first web address was? As for Berners-Lee, he went on to become a major internet thought leader and an outspoken proponent of net neutrality. He was among the first people inducted to the Internet Hall of Fame in He was knighted for the feat of creating the World Wide Web, in what was surely the most justifiable knighting since Heath Ledger.

Thanks for the past 30 years of connectivity and culture. We urgently need an ambitious, coordinated effort to tackle the threats facing the internet and the web, and make sure that everyone is able to access the benefits of digital technology.

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To receive a weekly news brief on the most important stories in tech, subscribe to The Web This Week. No one saw the revolution at first. The web, which was running on NeXTStations -- Steve Job designed Unix workstations that would prove to be the forefathers of today's Macs -- was only available to a few people in techie internet circles.

That came later. It wasn't until early that the public learned about the web from some guy named Steven J. Looking back, I didn't quite get it either.

WAIS was one of the first of what we now call public search engines. WAIS was the first to make most public internet resources searchable. WAIS was really Google's ancestor. But, without the web, search engines would still be limited to restricted areas of knowledge. At the same time, people were becoming more and more interested in using the internet for more than just research.

Usenet , a primitive social network of many discussion groups, whetted people's appetite for socializing and doing business on the net. Unfortunately, you couldn't even sell your used car on the net, never mind run a company like Amazon. Yes, believe it or not, before today's hyper-commercialized internet appeared where you can barely find a single webpage without advertisements or cookies, in the early 90s you couldn't do anything related to business on the net.

That would change with CIX. This same wide-area network was also used by NSFNET; part of the older non-commercial internet was running on the same cables and routers. It was a long time ago. Oh, how things have changed! This agreement opened Pandora's box. Now, everyone wanted to use the rapidly expanding network, as data jumped from business to nonprofit networks and back again. This annoyed everyone on the early internet who couldn't even easily send emails to one another.

He got the two sides to agree to a "great compromise. As Kapor said then, "In taking this significant step, we enable greater freedom from content restrictions on the Internet. This is where it starts.