A look back at the early years of the WWW including the first online newspaper, the forerunners of Facebook and the first attempts at censorship.

(Image: Rudolf A. Blaha)

History of the Internet: As before 30 years ago the World Wide Web came into being A hypertext system for everyone Opening for commercial worlds Early Giants Beginnings in Germany Article in c’t 27 / 2020 read The Geneva headquarters of the European Organization for Nuclear Research CERN in the eighties: a coming and going. Only the 10. 000 scientists listed in the internal phone book belonged to CERN itself, Tim Berners-Lee describes the situation in his essay “A Brief History of the Web”; the rest were scientists from all over the world. If you want to understand why and how the World Wide Web came into the world, you have to understand this bustle.

The computer and network infrastructure at CERN: a pretty wild patchwork of different systems. Berners-Lee had written a hypertext application with which he could record the relationships between people, programs and hardware. One day he realized that something like his program should be available for everyone to share information. In March he proposed to his boss, Mike Sendall, that such a system be implemented. He gave the green light.

Tim Berners-Lee’s first project proposal included the requirement that web documents must be readable by everyone, regardless of the computer and operating system. In October 1990 Berners-Lee had three essential elements for it formulated, which still form the technical cornerstones of web architecture today: a first draft of the markup language HTML, Uniform Resource Identifiers, with which resources in the network can be addressed, and HTTP as the transmission protocol for WWW content.

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