The World Wide Web Celebrates 15 Years

Where were you on August 6, 1991, the day the web was born? Last Sunday marked the 15th anniversary of Tim Berners-Lee’s historic WWW project announcement on the alt.hypertext newsgroup, while he was working at CERN, which of course lead to the creation of the modern day web as we know it. Here’s his original “WorldWideWeb: Summary” post that started it all. For more coverage of this anniversary, check out Ryan Singel’s great write-up on Wired’s 27B Stroke 6 blog.

From Tim’s “WorldWideWeb: Summary” usenet post:

The WWW world consists of documents, and links. Indexes are special documents
which, rather than being read, may be searched. The result of such a search is
another (“virtual”) document containing links to the documents found. A simple
protocol (“HTTP”) is used to allow a browser program to request a keyword
search by a remote information server.

The web contains documents in many formats. Those documents which are
hypertext, (real or virtual) contain links to other documents, or places
within documents. All documents, whether real, virtual or indexes, look similar
to the reader and are contained within the same addressing scheme.

To follow a link, a reader clicks with a mouse (or types in a number if he or
she has no mouse). To search and index, a reader gives keywords (or other
search criteria). These are the only operations necessary to access the entire
world of data.