World Wide Web 20th Birthday

With or without us realizing, the technology has been improving significantly over the past 20 years. One of the most significant changes can be spotted in the improvement of computer technology.

The World Wide Web will turn 20 years old. Sir Tim Berners-Lee invented this world-changing layer on top of the Internet on this day in 1989. It's hard to overstate the impact this young technology has had already and it's even more exciting to think about where it's going in the future.

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Twenty years ago computers were either the size of a basketball court or they were novelties that we played with. Twenty years ago we got our news at 6 p.m. on television or in the morning newspaper. Twenty years ago, if you wanted to buy a sweater, you drove from store to store until you spent as much on gas as you did on the sweater.

Tim Berners-Lee, who was working at the European Organization for Nuclear Research near Geneva, Switzerland, submitted a proposal to his bosses on how the organization could do a better job of keeping track of information. It involved publishing documents online with links to tie everything together, and it was the idea which eventually turned into the World Wide Web.

Today, the Web turns 20 years old. In the TED talk embedded above, Tim Berners-Lee recalls how he invented the World Wide Web twenty years ago. It was a “play project” that his boss let him do on the side. Berners-Lee notes that the original Web was for connecting documents together online, and then argues quite eloquently why the Web now has to evolve from linked documents to linked data . The Web is becoming a massive interlinked computer, and computers need data. As more and more data becomes linked across the Web, the more that it can be accessed, analyzed, and computed. As Berners-Lee says, “Data is relationships.”

Twenty years ago this month, something happened at CERN that would change the world forever: Tim Berners-Lee handed a document to his supervisor Mike Sendall entitled "Information Management : a Proposal". "Vague, but exciting" is how Mike described it, and he gave Tim the nod to take his proposal forward. The following year, the World Wide Web was born.

"Twenty years ago, Tim had a grand vision that became the World Wide Web. The world has never been the same," Gene Phifer, an analyst for Gartner Inc., said in a blog post. "To sum it up, the Web has completely democratized access to information, products, services, applications and other human beings. Prior to the Web, we had to travel to libraries to look up information. Prior to the Web, we had to go to bookstores to buy books. Prior to the Web, we had to use travel agents to set up a trip. And prior to the Web, the best place to meet friends was at church or a bar."

But even Olds conceded that Berners-Lee's paper was the seed that brought along all the rest.

"Without the paper, we may still be living in a world where the Internet is more like a collection of islands rather than a completely interconnected whole," he added. "The paper's impact on our productivity is enormous. It's changed the way we pay our bills, do research, get news, and sell our products and services. The Berners-Lee proposition was one of the great ideas of the 20th century, and it launched a revolution that has changed our society in a fundamental way. Not bad for a single paper."