Happy 15th B-Day World Wide Web!

Light those 15 candles! Now close your eyes and make a wish. 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.

Research centres

To most at Cern, complex protocols were just fine, but to Berners-Lee, there was clearly a need to manage better the digital information available in various databases and distributed across a plethora of computers at Cern and its collaborating universities and research centres around the globe.

Hence the web's March 1989 birthday. "Vague, but exciting" were the words that Berners-Lee's boss, Mike Sendall, scrawled across the top of the proposal document as he encouraged his protégé to continue.

The following year a less vague, but equally exciting, proposal ensued, and Sendall was persuaded to buy two shiny new NeXT computers for Berners-Lee to work on.

In September 1990, they arrived, and by Christmas, the World Wide Web as we know it was up and running with its defining features of the URL, the hypertext mark-up language (html) and the hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP) all fully defined. Birthday number two.

Berners-Lee's first browser was every bit as powerful as any modern day product, more so in some ways since the web was originally conceived as a two-way medium: Berners-Lee's browser was also an editor.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7375703.stm