Can we imagine life without the World Wide Web?

The World Wide Web was first created to help scientists share information seamlessly with each other

Have a doubt? Just google it! Want to know more about something? No problem at all… search for it online. Have some information or even a thought that you want to share with the world? Post it on a relevant site. How about ordering a pizza? Oh, there are many ways to do that. Can you even imagine a life without the World Wide Web?

It was 1989. Tim Berners-Lee was getting really fed up of having to move to different computers each time he wanted to access different pieces of information. He was working at CERN — the particle physics lab in Switzerland — and now he came up with a proposal for an Information Management system that his boss thought was “vague but exciting”. Berners-Lee was encouraged to explore the idea further. Using HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language), URL (Uniform Resource Locator) and HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol), Berners- Lee did indeed lose the ‘vague’ part and by December of 1990, the exciting World Wide Web was born. HTML, URL and HTTP all remain familiar to us today in spite of the zillion transformations that web development has undergone and so too remains the first web site - http://info.cern.ch

The World Wide Web (Berners-Lee thought of calling it “Information Mesh”, “The Information Mine”, and “Mine of Information” before he decided on the Web) was first created to help scientists share information seamlessly with each other. But Tim Berners-Lee was clear that such a powerful tool needed to be available to everyone. So, he released the source code for free and today we have this marvel that anyone can use. Sir Tim was knighted and feted but he never has made any money directly from his amazing creation.

In 1992, there were only ten web servers around the world. Today there are over 100 million. However, the date we must remember is April 30, 1993. That’s when people and companies began to build their own websites.

Many of us use the words ‘internet’ and ‘web’ without discriminating between the two. Yet, they are not the same. The internet is a network of connected computers while the Web refers to the collection of web pages that are available on it. Using the internet to access the web is something like using roads to go to specific places. The Web is a part of the internet.

Physicist Russel Seitz concluded that all the data that we send back and forth every day and consequently the internet itself, would only weigh around 50 grams! Google alone gets around 5.6 billion search requests every day. The most keyed-in word? YouTube, of course. We watch more than 5 billion videos every day. And this is even though the first video was uploaded to the site only in 2005. File sharing and media streaming make up more than half of the traffic on the Web. About half the internet’s consumers are Asian — no surprises there.

After leaving CERN, Sir Tim watched his creation grow beyond his wildest dreams. Concerned about the power the Web wielded, he set up The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), an international standards organisation for the World Wide Web in 1994. On the Web’s 30th birthday, he put out an open letter in which he articulated a word of caution amidst all the euphoria, “while the Web has created opportunity, given marginalized groups a voice, and made our daily lives easier, it has also created opportunity for scammers, given a voice to those who spread hatred, and made all kinds of crime easier to commit.”

By the way, someone placed the first online order in 1994. It was to Pizza Hut!

(Valsala is a writer and a soft-skills and communications trainer.)