Happy birthday to the Internet, created on December 25, 1990.
Sir Timothy John Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web at Geneva-based CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, and he made the first successful hypertext communication 21 years ago on December 25.
Berners-Lee is a British computer scientist and professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
He implemented the first successful communication between a Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) client and server via the Internet on December 25, 1990. Fourteen years later, he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II for his pioneering work.
He previously has said that he simply "just had to take the hypertext idea and connect it to the Transmission Control Protocol and domain name system ideas and—ta-da!—the World Wide Web.
“Creating the web was really an act of desperation, because the situation without it was very difficult when I was working at CERN later. Most of the technology involved in the web, like the hypertext, like the Internet, multifont text objects, had all been designed already. I just had to put them together.”
In November 2009, Berners-Lee launched the World Wide Web Foundation in order to "Advance the Web to empower humanity by launching transformative programs that build local capacity to leverage the Web as a medium for positive change.
The science fiction term “cyberspace” was employed for the World Wide Web by John Perry Barlow, a lyric writer for the Grateful Dead music group. In 1996, he published The Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace from Davos, Switzerland.
"I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind,” he wrote. “On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.
"We will create a civilization of the Mind in Cyberspace. May it be more humane and fair than the world your governments have made before."
The Internet has transformed the world in lightning speed. TIME magazine has noted, “Unlike so many of the inventions that have moved the world, this one truly was the work of one man . . . the World Wide Web is Berners-Lee's alone. He designed it. He loosed it on the world. And he more than anyone else has fought to keep it open, non-proprietary, and free.
“ . . . It's hard to overstate the impact of the global system he created. It's almost Gutenbergian. He took a powerful communications system that only the élite could use and turned it into a mass medium.”
Media mogul Rudolph Murdock has stated, “The Internet has been the most fundamental change during my lifetime and for hundreds of years... it's the biggest thing since the invention of writing.'”