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The Web Turns 25…Sort Of

In March 1989, Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee proposed a way to link together documents on different computers that were connected to the Internet.

This article was published in Scientific American’s former blog network and reflects the views of the author, not necessarily those of Scientific American


In March 1989, Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee proposed a way to link together documents on different computers that were connected to the Internet. He sent a brief proposal to his boss at CERN, the high-energy physics lab in Geneva, and it sat on a shelf for 14 months. Berners-Lee recirculated the pitch, got an okay to spend work time on the project, and after a flurry of programming, he and a few dedicated colleagues took the “world wide web” live on Dec. 25, 1990.

Despite that date, online media and the World Wide Web Consortium are trumpeting today as “the 25th birthday of the Web,” because it’s the date Berners-Lee filed his proposal. I guess that works, if you consider the moment of conception as your birthday, rather than the moment you came gasping out of the womb into the world.

>>see our In-Depth Report on the birth of the Web>>


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It’s worth noting that the words “world wide web” do not appear anywhere in the proposal. Berners-Lee wrote the proposal as a way to organize his ideas, and to try to get some time and money to work them up. He didn’t hit upon the name until more than a year later. I’m familiar with the details because he and I wrote a book together in 1999, Weaving the Web, which tells the real story of how the Web was created.

Furthermore, the proposal is dated "March 1989." There's no day in the date. Ironically, five years ago CERN celebrated the 20th anniversary on March 13—yes, a Friday!

Regardless of the date, the thinking, cobbling together and evangelizing of the Web in the early years is a fascinating tale. After the Christmas 1990 launch, Berners-Lee spent two years trying to convince people to create browsers and to post Web pages. And no, Netscape did not invent the browser, a legend that the company’s founders are still trying to create today. Lots of people and places were building different browsers in the early 1990s, and Berners-Lee and his friends put the first one online.

If you’d like to learn more, Scientific American assembled a lot of original material in 2009 (upon the 20th anniversary) about the early Web days, including a profile of Berners-Lee that I had written earlier. All of it is still pertinent today.

If you’d like to take part in the birthday celebration, check out some fun being organized by the World Wide Web Consortium, which Berners-Lee started in 1994 and has run ever since. It has an official anniversary page, with a video from Berners-Lee. And it is encouraging people to post birthday wishes at the Twitter hashtag #web25.

Berners-Lee is also holding an “Ask Me Anything” session on Reddit today at 3:00 p.m. EST—a typed Q&A, a kind of live global chat with people worldwide—which makes me smile. He’s still pushing the boundaries of how we can all communicate together over the Web.

Photo of Tim Berners-Lee © DONNA COVENEY

 

Mark Fischetti has been a senior editor at Scientific American for 17 years and has covered sustainability issues, including climate, weather, environment, energy, food, water, biodiversity, population, and more. He assigns and edits feature articles, commentaries and news by journalists and scientists and also writes in those formats. He edits History, the magazine's department looking at science advances throughout time. He was founding managing editor of two spinoff magazines: Scientific American Mind and Scientific American Earth 3.0. His 2001 freelance article for the magazine, "Drowning New Orleans," predicted the widespread disaster that a storm like Hurricane Katrina would impose on the city. His video What Happens to Your Body after You Die?, has more than 12 million views on YouTube. Fischetti has written freelance articles for the New York Times, Sports Illustrated, Smithsonian, Technology Review, Fast Company, and many others. He co-authored the book Weaving the Web with Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, which tells the real story of how the Web was created. He also co-authored The New Killer Diseases with microbiologist Elinor Levy. Fischetti is a former managing editor of IEEE Spectrum Magazine and of Family Business Magazine. He has a physics degree and has twice served as the Attaway Fellow in Civic Culture at Centenary College of Louisiana, which awarded him an honorary doctorate. In 2021 he received the American Geophysical Union's Robert C. Cowen Award for Sustained Achievement in Science Journalism, which celebrates a career of outstanding reporting on the Earth and space sciences. He has appeared on NBC's Meet the Press, CNN, the History Channel, NPR News and many news radio stations. Follow Fischetti on X (formerly Twitter) @markfischetti

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