Happy Birthday to the WWW
The Internet? We are not interested in it. — Bill Gates, 1993
The very first webpage was posted on this August 6, 1991. Computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee posted the “plain vanilla” web page on the servers at CERN where he worked at the time. The computer wizard developed the protocols for HTML, HTTP and URLs which are still the underlying structures of the Web.
A copy of the first web page is still hosted on the CERN website.
You can view it here:
http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html
Like so many things these days, the “Father of the Web” Berners-Lee recently sold the World Wide Web source code as a NFT (non-fungible token) for $5,400,000.
And like so many things these days, we often have to look up the definitions of new technology. A NFT is a unique digital asset protected by blockchain technology. Blockchain is a “digital ledger” which records information in a way that makes it nearly impossible to change. The information is stored in digital blocks that are chained together using algorithms and then distributed across a blockchain network to prevent hacking or alteration of the data.
As something of a digital dinosaur, I first used the Internet back in 1979 on the PLATO system at UIUC (the University of Illinois in Urbana Champaign). PLATO was the world’s first distributed computer aided learning system. And in addition to learning many things, of course, we used it to play games :-). In fact, at UIUC I once got to shake hands with the John Bardeen, the only person to ever win the Nobel prize for physics twice. Professor Bardeen co-invented the transistor — the little devices that helped make our technological age possible.
https://distributedmuseum.illinois.edu/exhibit/plato/
Do you remember the first time you used the Internet? How about the World Wide Web? And if you are truly a dinosaur, like me, do you remember TVs and radios with vacuum tubes? Please leave a comment about your first time on the Net or Web or old bygone tech, like black and white TV and rotary phones.
Happy Birthday WWW — what would we do without you?
