Celebrate 20 Years of the World Wide Web

Well, to be honest, the World Wide Web turns 20 today, in idea form, not in actual implementation. It was 20 years ago in March 1989 that Tim Berners-Lee wrote the paper Information Management: A Proposal.

This document was an attempt to persuade CERN management that a global hypertext system was in CERN's interests. Note that the only name I had for it at this time was "Mesh" -- I decided on "World Wide Web" when writing the code in 1990.

While it's always said that the document was written in the somewhat vague March 1989, March 13th is the day that CERN decided to celebrate the event, so we'll take that as a mandate. Here are the events of the day (all CET). CERN had webcast the events as well.

Due to time differences, however, this has all come and gone for those of us in North America!

• 14:00: Welcome by Professor Rolf Heuer, Director General of CERN
• 14:05: Panel: The history of the Web with Ben Segal, Jean-Francois Groff and Robert Cailliau
• 15:00: Demo of the NeXT computer on which Tim Berners-Lee developed the Web and which was also the first Web server
• 15:15: ** break **
• 16:00: Keynote: Tim Berners-Lee
• 16:30: Panel: The future of the Web with Chris Bizer, Stephane Boyera, Dan Brickley and Tom Scott
• 17:00: Close

While the Internet and the World Wide Web are often used interchangeably, they are not the same thing. You could think of the Internet as being the United States to the World Wide Web's California.

In reality, the Internet is the infrastructure, the software and hardware network which actually began as ARPANET, while the WWW is a service, a collection of interconnected documents and other resources, linked by hyperlinks and URLs.

To those of us browsing around the WWW: who cares, right? It is difficult to imagine the world without the WWW, and to be honest, most of our children would view a world without the WWW as we would have viewed the world without TV in the early 80's.

Browse on!