ruthless
Rift Surfer
copied from msnbc.com
The greatest moment in the Web's history has to be the instant of its own creation. On Christmas morning 1990, Tim Berners Lee and Robert Cailliau of the CERN research lab in Geneva communicated with the world's first Web server--presenting all of us with a Christmas gift that keeps on giving.
According to the Living Internet site, Berners Lee originally developed a hypertext system to keep track of the hundreds of projects, software, and computers in use at CERN's High Energy Physics department. Using a NeXT computer, Berners Lee developed a rudimentary browser in the fall of 1990. He and Cailliau then created the first Web content: the CERN phone directory.
The following August, Berners Lee unveiled his creation to the world (or at least, to the portion of the world that logged on to the alt.hypertext newsgroup). By the end of 1992, the Net hosted 50 Web servers. By the end of 1994, that number had grown to 2500. The Big Bang had already begun.
The earlier development of the Internet gave us the infrastructure computers needed in order to communicate, but the Web provided the Net's most important cargo--what today amounts to more than 135 million Web sites, connected by a rat's nest of hyperlinks and growing at a steady 5 percent per month, according to Netcraft. No aspect of our lives remains untouched by the Web. The fact that you're reading this on your computer screen--not on paper--says it all.
The greatest moment in the Web's history has to be the instant of its own creation. On Christmas morning 1990, Tim Berners Lee and Robert Cailliau of the CERN research lab in Geneva communicated with the world's first Web server--presenting all of us with a Christmas gift that keeps on giving.
According to the Living Internet site, Berners Lee originally developed a hypertext system to keep track of the hundreds of projects, software, and computers in use at CERN's High Energy Physics department. Using a NeXT computer, Berners Lee developed a rudimentary browser in the fall of 1990. He and Cailliau then created the first Web content: the CERN phone directory.
The following August, Berners Lee unveiled his creation to the world (or at least, to the portion of the world that logged on to the alt.hypertext newsgroup). By the end of 1992, the Net hosted 50 Web servers. By the end of 1994, that number had grown to 2500. The Big Bang had already begun.
The earlier development of the Internet gave us the infrastructure computers needed in order to communicate, but the Web provided the Net's most important cargo--what today amounts to more than 135 million Web sites, connected by a rat's nest of hyperlinks and growing at a steady 5 percent per month, according to Netcraft. No aspect of our lives remains untouched by the Web. The fact that you're reading this on your computer screen--not on paper--says it all.
