August 2021 marks the 30th anniversary of the world wide web and the first ever website!
August 6th to be exact.
But hasn't the internet been around much longer than that? Yes and in fact, January 1, 1983 is considered the official birthday of the Internet. Before this time there wasn't a standard way for computer networks to communicate with each other and so a new communications protocol was established called Transfer Control Protocol/Internetwork Protocol (TCP/IP). The creation of this gave birth to the Internet as a global system of interconnected computer networks.
Whilst the terms 'internet' and 'World Wide Web' are often used without much distinction, they don't mean the same thing. The World Wide Web is a global collection of documents and other resources, linked by (Hypertext Markup Language), HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol), and URIs (Uniform Resource Identifiers).
And so it was on August 6, 1991, that British computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee quietly published the first-ever website while working at CERN in Switzerland (more about this later) and the world wide web was born and so started the change of the world as we knew it as everyone got online.
30 years is definitely a milestone worth celebrating, and who doesn't love a celebration?! This particular anniversary has got us thinking about everything WWW, internet and digital related. So, we've taken a trip down memory lane to remember the 'firsts', get nostalgic and look at how much our online activities have evolved.
"Over the past several centuries humankind has seen a succession of paradigm shifts that have brought us forward into the modern era, but none has had the seismic impact on our daily lives as the creation of the World Wide Web." - Cassandra Hatton, global head of science and popular culture at Sotheby's.
Stay tuned this month to celebrate all things online for 30 days for the 30 years of the World Wide Web!