It was 25 years ago that Sir Tim Berners-Lee created an epoch-changing invention, the World Wide Web, a revolutionary way for people to share information using different computers.<br /><br />The World Wide Web is not the Internet. The Internet is a network of interconnected computers, the World Wide Web is how people share information on the Internet.<br /><br />The idea came to Berners-Lee while he was working at the CERN physics lab in Geneva.<br /><br />The man himself describes what what was happening at the time:<br />“Well, it was in 1989 and the Internet already existed and you could send e-mail, but there were no websites. So there was no http, no html. There was no space of things you could click through. And it began because I was frustrated. It didn’t exist. I imagined a system where you could just click from one to the other and that was so compelling that I decided that I wanted to build it.”<br /><br />Sir Tim was a 34-year-old software engineer at the time. Initially he wrote a paper called “Information Management”: A Proposal.” His boss wrote the paper was “vague, but exciting.”<br /><br />The rest is history. The World Wide Web is used by billions around the world. The past is one thing, but Berners-Lee is thinking about the future: “We need to think about the next 25 years and make sure that we’ve established the principles that the web is being based on; principles of openness, principles of privacy, principles of not being censored, for example.”<br /><br />For the 25th birthday, no candles nor cakes, just a wish: Berners-Lee says he would like to see the World Wide Web accessible and affordable for everyone in the world.
