It seems impossible in a hi-tech, multi-platform, interconnected world to imagine a time and place without the Web. From browsing to blogging, searching to streaming, the Web has transformed the ways in which people source information, communicate, work, and express themselves.
Although the World Wide Web and the Internet are often used interchangeably, the Web is really an information system that functions over the Internet, while the latter describes the global network of connected computers that acts as an open platform.
The Web's creation is credited to Sir Tim Berners-Lee, who was working for the European laboratory for particle physics (CERN) in the 1980s. In March 1989, he wrote a paper titled “Information Management: A Proposal“, which suggested information be made available using hypertext links to display pages.
Berners-Lee essentially took existing hypertext, transmission control protocol and domain name system technology, and enabled them to work together as an information system that was linked globally - the World Wide Web.
By December 1990, Berners-Lee had developed all the necessary pieces of the Web puzzle and set up an initial system on the NeXT workstation at CERN. Berners-Lee made his invention free and publicly available, helping to drive innovation and widespread use.
Crawl before you surf
A little more than a decade ago, looking for information would require a visit to the library and rummaging through books, print media, directories or archived material. But as the Web grew in size and scope, browsers and search engines emerged and soon finding anything from a local plumber to an obscure Italian chapel became as easy as entering a few keywords.
Following the introduction of the Web, a series of browsers began springing up, allowing users to search the growing number of Web pages. It wasn't until Marc Andreessen's Mosaic for X, however, that a multi-platform browser became available. A year later in 1994, Andreessen joined Jim Clark to form Netscape and released the Netscape Navigator, featuring most of the capabilities available on modern browsers. Microsoft only entered the browser game two years later, with the launch of Windows 95 and the browser that would eventually overtake all others - Internet Explorer.
As the number of Web browsers grew, so did the variety of search engines. The first search engine that let users search for any word on a Web page was WebCrawler, developed by Brian Pinkerton in 1994. In April of the same year, Jerry Yang and David Filo, then students at Stanford University, started compiling a list of links to their favourite online sites. The guide eventually grew so extensive that they turned the collection into various databases, invited users to add links, and before long Yahoo was born.
The search engine that eventually spawned its own verb, Google, was the brainchild of another two Stanford graduates, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who set up shop in a garage in 1998 and three years later had built up an index of three billion Web documents.
Putting the .com into commerce
It soon became clear that the global, free-to-use information network had incredible commercial potential. This massive, easy-to-reach market was an opportunity business quickly recognised, leading to the rise, and dramatic crash, of the dot-com industry.
Many start-ups saw the Web as a way to conduct business without the traditional overheads of offices, travelling expenses and other physical operating costs. Stock prices based on the potential value of these companies soared and commercial Web pages and online marketing grew at a meteoric rate as dot-com companies flooded the market in the mid-1990s.
However, not all of these new ventures were able to turn initial ideas and capital into a profitable enterprise, leading to a stock market crash later in the decade. The bubble burst in the early 2000s with many companies' stocks plummeting as they were unable to keep up with larger players, or secure a big enough share of the market. By the end of 2002, the dot-com collapse had resulted in a $5 trillion loss in market value.
Face to Facebook
Social media sites such as Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, and YouTube have become the new meeting and mingling places, where users spend hours updating their status, posting photos, sharing content and personal information. They connect people to friends they haven't seen in decades, or people on the other side of the world that share their interests.
As a relatively new development, it is uncertain whether social networking will bring people closer, or lead to decreased interaction in the real world. But as technology improves, allowing faster connections speeds, data transfer and content sharing, these sites will continue to shape the ways in which people communicate.
It's been a revolutionary 20 years for the Web and for the billions of people who use it every day. In looking back at the many developments in the Web's brief but formidable history, the realisation of how far things have come is matched only by how far they could still go.
Sources:
http://www.elon.edu/e-web/predictions/expertsurveys/default.xhtml
http://www.acm.org/crossroads/xrds2-1/inet-history.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_World_Wide_Web
http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/Kids
http://www.zakon.org/robert/internet/timeline/
http://mkaz.com//ebeab/history/
http://www.google.com/corporate/history.html
http://www.isoc.org/internet/history/brief.shtml
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