It was 20 years ago today…
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Cloud, People, Web browser, Server, Internet on
Tim Berners-Lee may not have been Sergeant Pepper, but his work at CERN has left the world with a vital and powerful communications tool.
CERN has chosen to mark today to commemorate the approval of the initial project that two years later became the public web. It’s been surprising to think just how quickly the Web became the stuff of everyday life, and the place (the cyberspace?) where millions of us work.
I’ve been using the web since a few days after the first public web server went live, with my first access through a university terminal and a little text browser. It was a year or so later that I sneaked into the old SCO offices in Watford on a Sunday afternoon to be shown the the glowing grey pixels of the first release of the Mosaic browser.
It was only a year or so later that Mary and I wrote a round up of all the web browsers then available. It’s hard to imagine in these days of IE, Mozilla, Chrome and Safari that there more than 20 different browsers - a pre-Cambrian explosion of the Web. Shortly after that I moved to Bath, to help found UK Online, one of the first web-based content services - a direct ancestor of the CMS systems that power IT Pro…
Time flies, and the Web has become all pervasive - on our phones, our TVs, even baked into the hardware in our homes. We work using web-based cloud services, and we shop and talk all across the Web.
So, in a flash of historical perspective, here is a picture of the first web server. It’s Tim Berners-Lee’s original NeXT Cube, now in a case in CERN’s small museum. And the sticker? “Do Not Power Down. This Is A Server.”
–Simon
(In Silicon Valley)
Rated: 100% (1 votes)
Loading ...Comment by kevin spencer - March 13, 2009 on 7:53 pm
Amazing stuff! internet was borne in real terms some 18 years ago by tim berners-lee out of some cern project,what will he come out with next!
some thing equaly awesome i guess!
also interesting to note…”we are no longer a bunch of computer geeks”…are we? or has the bunch just got bigger!!
Trackback by - February 9, 2012 on 7:24 am
will smith scientology…
[…]cold concrete cell with saw dust covered floor […]…
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