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The World Wide Web (WWW) marked its 20th anniversary and its founders admitted there were bits of the phenomenon they do not like: advertising and "snooping".
The creation of the web by British computer software genius Tim Berners-Lee and other scientists at the European particle physics laboratory (CERN) paved the way for the internet explosion which has changed our daily lives.
Berners-Lee and former colleagues such as Robert Cailliau, who originally set up the system to allow thousands of scientists around the world to swap, view and comment on their research, regardless of the distance or computer system, took part in commemorations on Friday at the laboratory.
"Back then there were 26 web servers. Now there are 10 to the power of 11 pages, that's a many as the neurones in your brain," said Berners-Lee, who still has an active hand in the web's development.
In March 1989, the young Berners-Lee handed his supervisor in Geneva a document entitled Information Management: A Proposal.
The supervisor described it as "vague, but exciting" and gave it the go-ahead, although it took a good year or two to get off the ground and serve nuclear physicists in Europe initially.
Former CERN systems engineer Cailliau, who teamed up with Berners-Lee, said: "It was really in the air, something that had to happen sooner or later."
They drew up the global hypertext language - which is behind the "http" on website addresses and the links between pages - and came up with the first web browser in October 1990, which looks remarkably similar to the ones used today.
"Everything that people talk about today, blogs and so on, that's what we were doing in 1990, there's no difference. That's how we started," Cailliau told Swiss radio RSR.
The http://WWW technology was first made available for wider use on the internet from 1991 after CERN was unable to ensure its development, and the organisation made a landmark decision two years later not to levy royalties.
"Without that, it would have died," Berners-Lee said.
Rest of article:
http://www.theage.com.au/news/techn...de-web-turns-20/2009/03/14/1236919607908.html
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