The Internet is now officially a classic car
03/12/2019
Although not all contemporaries agree on the exact date of the birth of today's Internet, many celebrate the WWW's birthday today on March 12.
At this point, it should simply be noted that the predecessor of the Internet, known as Arpanet, was launched on October 29, 1969. It was used to network the mainframe computers of universities and research institutes. Although this was also worldwide, it was not publicly accessible like today's Internet and had a different technological structure.
On March 12, 1989, exactly 30 years ago, Sir Timothy John Berners-Lee presented his then employer, CERN in Meyrin (Canton of Geneva), with a document containing a technical proposal on how to solve the communication problems within CERN at the time: one problem at CERN was that some of the laboratories were located in France and others in Switzerland. The two countries had different network infrastructures, which made it difficult to exchange information. In the document, he outlined the technical basis for how information could be easily exchanged between scientists in the future.
From this day onwards, Tim Berners-Lee was allowed to work on this project, even if only unofficially as a side project. The most important dates from this "birthday" are as follows: on November 12, 1990, another document by Tim Berners-Lee followed, which described in technical detail a system in which information could be exchanged as it is today. The term "WorldWideWeb" (global network, Internet) also officially appeared in this document. The document was officially accepted by CERN (in contrast to the first document of March 12, 1989) and the official project to build the "Internet" was launched by CERN.
On February 26, 1991, Tim Berners-Lee presented the world's first Internet browser, i.e. a program that could be used to call up "pages" on the Internet. However, at that time there were still no real, publicly accessible "pages". On May 17, 1991, Tim Berners-Lee delivered the first website that could be accessed publicly via a browser. Strictly speaking, the Internet was only "live" for the very first time on this date. For many, this date therefore marks the birth of the Internet.
In any case, it is astonishing that the Internet, which we take so much for granted today, is already 30 years old and has hardly changed at all. Of course, websites look different today than they used to, and the user interface has also changed massively and adapted to the new mobile devices, but the same technology still beats at its heart as it did many, many years ago... just like our classic cars!
And what kind of newspaper did people in Switzerland hold in their hands 30 years ago?
