World Wide Web Goes Public — Birth of the Digital Age
Tim Berners-Lee, a British physicist at CERN in Geneva, had proposed a 'distributed information system' in 1989. By 1990 he had written the three foundational technologies: HTML (the markup language for web pages), HTTP (the protocol for transferring them), and URL (the addressing system). On 6 August 1991, he published the first web page and made the software freely available — a decision that gave the Web to humanity rather than a corporation. The Web spread rapidly among universities and research institutions. In 1993, the Mosaic browser (created at the University of Illinois) gave the Web a graphical interface accessible to non-experts. In 1994, Netscape commercialised the browser; 1995 saw Amazon, eBay, and the dot-com boom. The Web transformed: journalism (news online), commerce (e-commerce), politics (social media), education (Wikipedia, MOOCs), culture (streaming, YouTube), and social interaction (Facebook, Twitter). By 2023, 5.4 billion people — two-thirds of humanity — were connected. Berners-Lee received no patent royalties and became a prominent advocate for a free and open Web, warning against its commercialisation and weaponisation.
- Year: 1991 CE
- Category: Scientific
