20 years since World Wide Webs " Big Bang Moment".

[Buddhas Hand]

The little conference that kickstarted the Web

By Mark Pesce

Posted Wed 21 May 2014, 2:37pm AEST

Photo: Tim Berners-Lee running World Wide Web software at CERN in 1994. (CERN)

As the 20th anniversary of the First International Conference on the World Wide Web approaches, one of its participants, Mark Pesce, reminisces about that "Big Bang" moment and the telling fact that it went largely undocumented.

Filled well beyond capacity, the auditorium echoed with excited chatter from over 400 mouths. Late arrivals hovered in a ring around the back of the hall. At precisely 9am, a youngish man - not yet a household name, not yet knighted, and his great task not yet complete - mounted the podium, leaned into the microphone, and said, "Welcome to the First International Conference on the World Wide Web."

If the Web can be said to have had a starting gun, it fired on that Wednesday morning, May 25, 1994, at CERN. Famous today for the Large Hadron Collider, and even then running the largest atom smasher in the world, CERN provided that bright fellow - Tim Berners-Lee - both resources and reason to create the software that defines the World Wide Web.

All of that had happened years before. At first no one really cared. Hypertext systems like Berners-Lee's oddly-named 'World Wide Web' had been around for 20 years, all of them full of potential to link all knowledge into a cohesive whole, yet all of them coming to nothing.

Berners-Lee kept at it for five years, talking CERN into giving away the software, making the World Wide Web freely available to anyone who wanted to use it for any purpose, an almost unheard of practice at the time. That trove of 'open source software' led to boffins around the world installing, modifying and improving upon Berners-Lee's work.

Those first researchers used the World Wide Web because they could fashion it into something that fitted their needs. In California, a team of two programmers took Berners-Lee's source code and adapted it for the delivery of three-dimensional models. Suddenly you could link not just pages to one another, but whole worlds.

I was one of those programmers.

Working with my friend Tony Parisi to leverage Tim Berners-Lee's work into something brand new - something Berners-Lee wanted, according to a page on the CERN website, but which he didn't know how to do himself - we completed our work during the first few weeks of 1994.

I dropped an email to Berners-Lee, telling him we'd solved his problem. He got right back to me. Would I be interested in presenting our work at a little conference he was organizing in Geneva?

So there I sat, in an auditorium filled well beyond capacity, all of us incredibly excited by the World Wide Web. No one said, "This is it - this is the unified global information system we've been dreaming of!", because no one had to say it. It was obvious.

During that conference the basic agreements fell into place that led to the beautiful web pages we enjoy today.

[AbbyNucksFan]

and porn was never the same since

[CanadianLoonie]

The Web reminds us that the pen is truly mightier than the sword

Technically, it's math that is mightier than the sword.

[Offensive Threat]

I grew up before the internet existed (gradded high school in 1985). I spent my entire time in university with no computer. No wikkipedia, no google, no nothing. Libraries were vital for studying.

I cant imagine not being connected now. I always have my phone. I take my tablet and laptop on vacation with me because I cant last a few days without the things I didnt have for the first almost 30 years of my life. The internet is one of mans great achievements. So far. Maybe the greatest of achievements.

When we showed my grandma google earth she cried when she saw the house near London she grew up in. She hasnt been back to England since she emigrated with grandpa and my dad, who was 5, to Canada. That was 69 years ago. Shes 96 now.

[Tre Mac]

Thx Al Gore, your invention has changed the world.

[CanuckGAME]

and porn was never the same since

if you havent tried watching porn on a phone dial up connection, you havent lived the struggle.

[Heretic]

Internet gaming sure took off - I still have a copy of my old Quake Clan site:

http://www.met.ca/qpf/

Now, as far as the article...well...the "Internet" has existed for a lot longer than 20 years ago...this is more about just the acceptance of HTML.

Here's another really good account of HTML:

http://www.w3.org/People/Raggett/book4/ch02.html

[Offensive Threat]

Internet gaming sure took off - I still have a copy of my old Quake Clan site:

http://www.met.ca/qpf/

Now, as far as the article...well...the "Internet" has existed for a lot longer than 20 years ago...this is more about just the acceptance of HTML.

Here's another really good account of HTML:

http://www.w3.org/People/Raggett/book4/ch02.html

You know history loves giving an exact date and a single person they can have kids memorize as the "father" of the interwebs. Yes, it took many years and the work of many many people but thats too boring for the history books.

[Buddhas Hand]

I grew up before the internet existed (gradded high school in 1985). I spent my entire time in university with no computer. No wikkipedia, no google, no nothing. Libraries were vital for studying.

I cant imagine not being connected now. I always have my phone. I take my tablet and laptop on vacation with me because I cant last a few days without the things I didnt have for the first almost 30 years of my life. The internet is one of mans great achievements. So far. Maybe the greatest of achievements.

When we showed my grandma google earth she cried when she saw the house near London she grew up in. She hasnt been back to England since she emigrated with grandpa and my dad, who was 5, to Canada. That was 69 years ago. Shes 96 now.

I finished high School in 1981 , have always been an information junkie - knowledge is power, I could only dream of having a tool like the internet.

Now i have a hand held device that connects me to the internet nearly anywhere, i to cannot imagine not being connected to the net.

The only achievements that rival the internet IMO are what our species has done in space.

I remember reading Asimov in the 70's where he

[Buddhas Hand]

Internet gaming sure took off - I still have a copy of my old Quake Clan site:

http://www.met.ca/qpf/

Now, as far as the article...well...the "Internet" has existed for a lot longer than 20 years ago...this is more about just the acceptance of HTML.

Here's another really good account of HTML:

http://www.w3.org/People/Raggett/book4/ch02.html

Direct quote from the article

"All of that had happened years before. At first no one really cared. Hypertext systems like Berners-Lee's oddly-named 'World Wide Web' had been around for 20 years, all of them full of potential to link all knowledge into a cohesive whole, yet all of them coming to nothing.

Here is a timeline for the internet

1958 . President Eisenhower requests funds to create ARPA. Approved as a line item in Air Force appropriations bill.

1961 . Len Kleinrock, Professor of Computer Science at UCLA, writes first paper on packet switching, "Information Flow in Large Communications Nets." Paper published in RLE Quarterly Progress Report.

1962 •J.C.R. Licklider & W. Clark write first paper on Internet Concept, "On-Line Man Computer Communications."

• Len Kleinrock writes Communication Nets, which describes design for packet switching network; used for ARPAnet

1964 . Paul Baran writes, "On Distributed Communications Networks," first paper on using message blocks to send info across a decentralized networktopology(Nodes and Links)

Oct. 1965

. First Network Experiment: Directed by Larry Roberts at MIT Lincoln Lab, two computers talked to each other using packet-switching technology.

Dec. 1966 . ARPA project begins. Larry Roberts is chief scientist.

Dec. 1968 . ARPANet contract given to Bolt, Beranek & Newman (BBN) in Cambridge, Mass.

Sept. 1, 1969 . First ARPANet node installed at UCLA Network Measurement Center. Kleinrock hooked up the Interface Message Processor to a Sigma 7 Computer.

Oct. 1, 1969 . Second node installed at Stanford Research Institute; connected to a SDS 940 computer. The first ARPANet message sent: "lo." Trying to spell log-in, but the system crashed!

Nov. 1, 1969 . Third node installed at University of California, Santa Barbara. Connected to an IBM 360/75. Dec. 1, 1969 . Fourth node installed at University of Utah. Connected to a DEC PDP-10.

March 1970 . Fifth node installed at BBN, across the country in Cambridge, Mass.

July 1970 . Alohanet, first packet radio network, operational at University of Hawaii. March 1972 . First basic e-mail programs written by Ray Tomlinson at BBN for ARPANET: SNDMSG and READMAIL. "@" sign chosen for its "at" meaning.

March 1973 . First ARPANET international connections to University College of London (England) and NORSAR (Norway). 1974 . Intelreleases the 8080 processor.

• Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn publish "A Protocol for Packet Network Interconnection," which details the design of TCP. 1976 . Apple Computer founded by Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak.

• Queen Elizabeth II sends out an e-mail.

. Vint Cerf joins ARPA as program manager.

1978 . TCP split into TCP and IP.

1979 . Bob Metcalfe and others found 3Com (Computer Communication Compatibility).

1980 . Tim Berners-Lee writes program called "Enquire Within," predecessor to the World Wide Web.

1981 . IBM announces its first Personal Computer. Microsoft creates DOS. 1983 . Cisco Systems founded. Nov. 1983 . Domain Name System (DNS) designed by Jon Postel, Paul Mockapetris, and Craig Partridge. .edu, .gov, .com, .mil, .org, .net, and .int created.

1984 • William Gibson writes "Neuromancer." Coins the term "cyberspace".

• Apple Computer introduces the Macintosh on January 24th.

March 15, 1985 . Symbolic.com becomes the first registered domain.

1986 . 5000 hosts on ARPAnet/Internet.

1987 • 10,000 hosts on the Internet.

• First Cisco routershipped.

• 25 million PCs sold in US.

1989 • 100,000 hosts on Internet.

• McAfee Associates founded; anti-virus software available for free. Quantum becomes America Online.

1990 . ARPAnet ends. Tim Berners-Lee creates the World Wide Web.

1992 "Surfing the Internet" is coined by Jean Armour Polly.

1993 . Mosaic Web browser developed by Marc Andreesen at University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana.

. InterNICcreated.

• Web grows by 341,000 percent in a year. April

1994 . Netscape Communications founded.

• Jeff Bezos writes the business plan for Amazon.com.

. Java's first public demonstration. Dec.

1994 Microsoft licenses technology from Spyglass to create Web browser for Windows 95. May 23, 1995 . Sun Microsystems releases Java.

August 24, 1995 . Windows 95 released. 1996 . Domain name tv.com sold to CNET for $15,000. Browser wars begin. Netscape and Microsoft two biggest players.

1997 . business.com sold for $150,000. January 1998 . Microsoft reaches a partial settlement with the Justice Department that allows personal computer makers to remove or hide its Internet software on new versions of Windows 95.

. Netscape announces plans to give its browser away for free.

1998 . US Depart of Commerce outlines proposal to privatize DNS. ICANN created by Jon Postel to oversee privatization. Jon Postel dies.

1999 •AOL buys Netscape; Andreesen steps down as full-time employee.

• Browsers wars declared over; Netscape and Microsoft share almost 100% of browser market.

• Microsoft declared a monopoly by US District Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson.

•Shawn Fanning creates Napster, opening the possibilities of peer-to-peer file sharing and igniting a copyright war in the music industry.

2000 . Fixed wireless, high-speed Internet technology is now seen as a viable alternative to copper and fiber optic lines placed in the ground.

. The Dot-Com Bubble bursts. A majority of the dot-coms ceased trading after burning through their venture capital, often without ever making a net profit. January 10, 2000 • AOL Merges with Time-Warner. AOL shareholders take 55% stake in newly formed company.

February 2000 . A large-scale denial of service attack is launched against some major Web sites like Yahoo! and eBay, alerting Web sites to the need for tighter security measures.

. 10,000,000 domain names have been registered.

September 2000 . There are 20,000,000 websites on the Internet, numbers doubling since February 2000.

July 2001 . A federal judge rules that Napster must remain offline until it can prevent copyrighted material from being shared by its users.

. The Code Red worm and Sircam virus infiltrate thousands of web servers and email accounts, respectively, causing a spike in Internet bandwidth usage and security breaches.

November 2001 . The European Council adopts the first treaty addressing criminal offenses committed over the Internet.

. First uncompressed real-time gigabit HDTV transmission across a wide-area IP network takes place on Internet2. January 2002 . .name begins resolving January 2003 . The SQL Slammer worm causes one of the largest and fastest spreading DDoS attacks ever, taking only 10 minutes to spread worldwide.

. The Internet celebrates its 'unofficial' 20th birthday.

September 2003 . The RIAA sues 261 individuals for allegedly distributing copyright music files over peer-to-peer networks December 2003 . The Research project "How much information 2003" finds that Instant messaging generates five billion messages a day (750GB), or 274 Terabytes a year and that e-mail generates about 400,000 terabytes of new information each year worldwide.

2005 . YouTube.com launches 2006 . There are an estimated 92 million Web sites online May 2006 . A massive DDOS assault on Blue Security, an anti-spam company, is redirected by Blue Security staff to their Movable Type-hosted blog. The result is that the DDOS instead knocks out all access to over 1.8 million active blogs. August 2006 . AOL announces that they will give for free virtually every service for which it charged a monthly fee, with income coming instead from advertising. October

2006 . There are an estimated 92 million Web sites online (some stats say over 100 million)

. Google Inc. acquires YouTube for $1.65 billion in a stock-for-stock transaction.

January 2007 . Microsoft launches its various consumer versions of Microsoft Vista. February 2007 . Apple surpasses one billion iTunes downloads. March 2007 . 1.114 billion people use the Internet according to Internet World Stats.

April 2007 . Search engine giant Google surpasses Microsoft as "the most valuable global brand," and also is the most visited Web site.

[Monty]

I grew up before the internet existed (gradded high school in 1985). I spent my entire time in university with no computer. No wikkipedia, no google, no nothing. Libraries were vital for studying.

I cant imagine not being connected now. I always have my phone. I take my tablet and laptop on vacation with me because I cant last a few days without the things I didnt have for the first almost 30 years of my life. The internet is one of mans great achievements. So far. Maybe the greatest of achievements.

When we showed my grandma google earth she cried when she saw the house near London she grew up in. She hasnt been back to England since she emigrated with grandpa and my dad, who was 5, to Canada. That was 69 years ago. Shes 96 now.

Even for me, graduating from highschool in 2000 and university in 2004, everything was done in the library. It's truly incredible how much has changed just in the last decade.

[Jägermeister]

Even for me, graduating from highschool in 2000 and university in 2004, everything was done in the library. It's truly incredible how much has changed just in the last decade.

I've been in University for 3 years and have never had the need to step foot in the library.