Gizmodo – Happy Birthday, Interwebz! How far you’ve come. See, if the Internet drew its first breath in the
fall of 1969, it took its first steps toward its potential on August 6, 1991. Took awhile there. But it was this first step that was just the beginning.
In the Beginning
The World Wide Web, or the internet that we now know and love, started off as project by British computer scientist and theorist Tim Berners-Lee while he worked at CERN. It was there that he built the
first website on a NeXTSTEP computer—think a Mac, but really old and really ugly—running the very first browser, appropriately named WorldWideWeb. The site didn’t have any bells and whistles. No ads or banners. Just links, little nuggets of text that make a database approach to learning and sharing ideas—really, the meat of what anyone on the web does to this day—possible.
Web 1.0
By ’92, Berners-Lee had uploaded the
very first picture to the web (don’t they look charming?), but it was still pretty far from reaching critical mass. It was in 1993, when he and CERN officially announced that the web would be open to everyone, that the games really began. Over the next several years, people started flocking to browsers like Mosaic, Netscape Navigator, and Internet Explorer to start browsing all these new sites. Anyone with some HTML know-how could make a website about anything they wanted. Somewhere out in California, Larry Page and Sergey Brin were working on the first beta of Google. Meanwhile, more and more people started using services like Prodigy, Compuserve, and AOL to get online.
Remember all those install disks? And dial-up?? Yeah, good times.
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