25 years of the World Wide Web: Top 10 interesting WWW facts
Today, you are able to access numerous webpages through a Web browser over the Internet. You use Facebook, Twitter, Wikipedia, Google and many other websites often to get information, stay in touch with people and remain updated.
Most of us heavily rely on the Internet, and the power of Internet is not hidden from anyone. But do you know the source of this power? Do you know when did you get this power to freely view any webpage? 25 years ago, on March 12, 1989 British engineer and computer scientist Sir Tim Berners-Lee, now Director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), wrote a proposal for what would finally become the World Wide Web.
On the 25th anniversary of the World Wide Web – a true milestone in the Internet history – here we bring you certain interesting facts about the Web:
1. On August 6, 1991, the first website http://info.cern.ch went online.
2. A NeXT Computer was used by Sir Tim Berners-Lee as the world’s first web server and also to write the first web browser – WorldWideWeb – in 1990.
3. Berners-Lee uploaded the first photo on the Web in 1992. That was an image of the CERN house band Les Horribles Cernettes.
4. On April 30, 1993, CERN, a European research organisation near Geneva, announced that the World Wide Web would be free to anyone, with no fees due.
5. It is believed that a turning point in the history of the the World Wide Web began with the launch of the Mosaic web browser in 1993. It was a graphical browser developed by a team at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois. Mosaic is the web browser credited with popularising the World Wide Web.
6. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the main international standards organisation for the World Wide Web, was founded by Tim Berners-Lee after he left CERN in October 1994.
7. Archie is considered to be the first Internet search engine. It was the first tool for indexing FTP archives, allowing people to find specific files.
8. If you dislike Internet users being addressed to as ‘surfers’, blame Jean Armour Polly. It was she who coined the term “Surfing the Internet”.
9. Pornography constitutes a big chunk of the Web for most of its existence, but the first website on the .xxx domain (meant for adult websites) went online in August 2011.
10. Most people tend to treat the Internet and the Web as synonymous. They, in fact while being related, are not. Internet refers to the vast networking infrastructure that connects millions of computers across the world and the World Wide Web is the worldwide collection of text pages, digital photographs, music files, videos, and animations, which users can access over the Internet. The Web uses the HTTP protocol to transmit data and is only a part of the Internet. The Internet includes a lot that is not necessarily the Web.