On its 30th anniversary, the internet now has 1.8 billion websites



[ad_1]

It has been 30 years since Tim Berners Lee, a young English software engineer, launched the world’s first website, while working at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research.

Most people who Google, share on Facebook, and buy from Amazon have never heard of Sir Tim Berners-Lee. But they might not have done any of these if he hadn’t invented the World Wide Web.

In 1989, Berners-Lee began working on ways to identify digital objects and retrieve them through browser software capable of rendering graphics and other images.

He released a proposal on March 12, 1989, paving the way for a technological revolution that transformed the way people buy goods, share ideas, obtain information, and more.

On August 6, 1991, he launched the first Internet site in the world, http://info.cern.ch, it was devoted to information on his World Wide Web project.

It is estimated that there are now over 1.8 billion websites.

Berners-Lee decided not to patent his technology and instead offered it as royalty free software.

This allowed other programmers to build on the foundation he laid, now creating over 1 billion websites that have helped bring over 3 billion people online.

In an interview with The Associated Press in 2019, Berners-Lee explained why he recently published an ambitious rulebook for governing online driving.

It was a bill of rights and obligations for the Internet – designed to counter the growing prevalence of disinformation, mass surveillance and government censorship.

“It feels like some of these questions were really tough,” Berners-Lee said.

“This new world in which much of our society is actually determined by how social media works and so on is new. And there is no rulebook written a hundred years ago.

“So this is, in a way, the first time that we have had a rule book where responsibility is shared.”

(with PA)

[ad_2]
Source link