The web, or world wide web as it was first called, staked its flag nearly three decades ago when British engineer and scientist Tim Berners-Lee launched the world’s first website, running on a NeXT computer at CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research) in Switzerland. The website was just a few sentences, but it “established vital first principles still essential to the web as it exists today: the notion of hyperlinks that reimagined documents (and eventually any form of media) as nonlinear texts, and the ability for anyone, anywhere in the world, to peruse that content by way of a browser: a piece of software that cohered to universal formatting standards.” Reference: Time.com.
Prior to the commercialization of the internet, the underlying technology—wide area networking—was first used in science laboratories (the 1950s), then the U.S. Department of Defense (1960s), and later expanded to universities (70’s and 80’s).
By 1993, increasing amounts of data transmitted at higher and higher speeds over fiber optic networks initiated the internet’s takeover of the global communication landscape. In April 1993 CERN made the World Wide Web available on a royalty-free basis, changing our world forever, and particularly how businesses went to market.
By 2000, the internet represented 51 percent of the information flow. In 2007, it represented more than 97 percent of the telecommunicated information. Today the internet hosts ever greater amounts of online information, commerce, entertainment, and social networking. Frankly, where would we be without it?
And that’s where we come in.