#Web30

Some World Wide Web Facts

August 1: World Wide Web Day

August 1 was World Wide Web Day. The World Wide Web (WWW) was conceived in 1989 at the CERN lab in Geneva, Switzerland, as a way for scientists to share knowledge.

How it began

Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web in 1989. While working at CERN, he wrote the code for WWW using a NeXT computer, to share documents among researchers across the world using hyperlinks. About 4 billion people use the internet today.

First Website

The world’s first website, at CERN, went online on August 6, 1991. Only Berners-Lee and his colleagues had browsers and so the world was not aware of the development. Today, about 1.9 billion websites are online.

First Image

Berners-Lee uploaded the first image to the internet, in 1992. It was of Les Horribles Cernettes, a parody pop band founded by CERN employees.

First Email

The first network email was sent by computer engineer Ray Tomlinson in 1971. The email to himself said “something like QWERTYUIOP”. It was sent from one computer to another computer sitting right beside it in Cambridge, Massachusetts, but it traveled via ARPANET, a network of computers that was the precursor to the internet.