Celebrating 30 Years of the World Wide Web

Last 2021 marked thirty years of the creation of the first web page in human history. However, there is some confusion to distinguish between the origin of web pages and the internet. Let’s get into it.

In 1969 the United States Department of Defense developed ARPANET, a closed network designed to connect universities and investigation centres. Little by little, it spread over until in the 1990s it became the network we know today.

It isn’t until August 6, 1991 when the first web page was made public by the English scientist Tim Berners-Lee, who worked at CERN at the time, and to which he called the World Wide Web (WWW).

Today, there’s still an accessible copy at https://www.w3.org/History/19921103-hypertext/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html:

This was only possible with the development of the HTTP protocol and the HTML language. However, there were no browsers with which to access these infomration directories. Although Tim Berners-Lee developed the first browser, they prospered with the arrival of Mosaic (the first one available for both Windows and Mac) and Netscape Navigator.

Being free of cost and integrated into Windows, the arrival of Internet Explorer in 1995 caused profound changes in the market. In response to the success of Microsoft, Netscape released the source code of its browser in 2004, giving birth to the Mozilla Foundation and, thus, to Mozilla Firefox. Finally, Google Chrome was launched in 2008, and it’s consolidated today as the most widely used browser in the world.

Over time, the business world realized its advertising potential. First commercial websites began to appear from 1993, such as that famous British magazine The Economist.

Here a new problem appears, "finding" all these pages. For this, spezialized search websites were created. They allowed searching for other websites, the first of all of them being Aliweb. Later other search engines arrived, such as Altavista and Yahoo!, but with its arrival in 1997, Google has become the most popular search engine in the Internet.

To wrap up, a curiosity: the NeXT computer were the world’s first web page was hosted, which was maintained by Tim Berners-Lee, had a sticker warning "DO NOT POWER IT DOWN!!", since if anyone had shut it down, the World Wide Web simply vanished.