Happy Birthday to the World Wide Web

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**Ratius**

http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/25-years-of-the-world-wide-web-the-inventor-of-the-web-tim-bernerslee-explains-how-it-all-began-9185040.html

Today marks the 25th birthday of an invention which has changed humanity forever, and created a new virtual world within a generation. There was no birthday cake yesterday, but you could have been forgiven for thinking a celebrity had just shown up at the Science Museum.

Instead, photographers and film crews were clustered around a black, decidedly old-fashioned computer and keyboard. In an attempt to make the spectacle a little more exciting, museum bosses had dressed up a worker in obligatory science garb – white coat and white gloves.

Baroness Martha Lane Fox was in attendance. The peer, who recently completed a stint as the government’s digital champion, took the limelight as the media gave up attempts to make the computer look interesting. Crowds of school-children passed by with barely a glance - understandable given the uninspiring sight of an old computer.
Read more: 10 things you need to know about the web (including how much it weighs)

But they couldn’t have been more wrong. For the NeXT cube is the machine on which the World Wide Web was created by British computer scientist Sir Tim Berners-Lee. The only hint of its importance a tattered white sticker with the warning: “This machine is a server: DO NOT POWER IT DOWN!!” It may be hard to believe now, but the worldwide web did not exist 25 years ago - until Sir Tim invented a way of using networks of computers to talk to each other.

Yet there was no initial grand ambition to emancipate the world through freedom of information for all. The beginnings were much more mundane: an attempt to improve communication between the thousands of scientists involved with Cern, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research, in Switzerland.

Sir Tim was a 34-year-old physics graduate working as a software engineer at Cern in 1989, when he wrote a paper simply titled "Information Management: A Proposal". It stated: “the hope would be to allow a pool of information to develop which could grow and evolve with the organisation and the projects it describes". Ironically, the aim was envisaged as “a universal linked information system” where “generality and portability are more important than fancy graphics techniques and complex extra facilities".

It was initially damned with faint praise, his boss Mike Sendall writing “vague but exciting” on the cover.

Porn and lolcat jokes aside, a big Happy Birthday to the WWW.
At the very least its made the world a smaller place and made it easier to communicate with each other - and thats a good thing imho.
Whether its chatting to a relative in Oz on skype, doing business online or someone uploading a picture from a troubled area that might not be seen through "mainstream" means, I salute you.

**cincydooley**

Thanks Al Gore!

**Dreadclaw69**

Happy 25th birthday to the home of p0rn, the internet hate machine, selfies, cat pictures, and photos of hipster's meals

**Wolfstan**

How do we see the next 25 years turning out?

Will the internet become more of a pain than a benefit? With all the security scares, hacks and security exploits will we just accept it as something to be put up with or will people just give up and find some other way? Is there another way?