Happy birthday Internet: The Web We Know Today was Born 30 Years Ago!
The World Wide Web has many birthdays: March 1989, when Tim Berners-Lee handed his boss a short document entitled Information Management: a Proposal, is one. Christmas of the following year, when the Web was up and running on two computers, is another. But perhaps the most important Web anniversary of all is 30 April 1993 . That’s the day that Cern put the web in the public domain, thereby ensuring that the world would have a single system for accessing the Internet, instead of a Microsoft Web, a Macintosh Web and who knows, perhaps even an Amstrad Web. Today, it is hard to imagine a world without the web, yet well into the 1990s, internet access was the reserve of the privileged few, mainly academics. Although the internet had been around since the 1970s, accessing documents on remote computers required the mastery of complex protocols. Scientists had been doing that for years, and at Cern, the European laboratory for particle physics in Geneva, they were particularly adept.
Picture: The declaration signed by Cern directors which set the web free in 1993.