[LINK] Happy Birthday World Wide Web!

[Jan Whitaker]

World's first web page recreated 20 years on

Published: May 1, 2013 - 9:46AM

The world's first web page will be dragged out of cyberspace and 
restored for today's internet browsers as part of a project to 
celebrate 20 years of the web.

The European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) said it had 
begun recreating the website that launched that world wide web, as 
well as the hardware that made the groundbreaking technology possible.

The world's first website was about the technology itself, according 
to CERN, allowing early browsers to learn about the new system and 
create their own web pages.

The project will allow future generations to understand the origin 
and importance of the web and its impact on modern life, said CERN 
web manager Dan Noyes.

"We're going to put these things back in place, so that a web 
developer or someone who's interested 100 years from now can read the 
first documentation that came out from the world wide web team," he said.

The project was launched to mark the 20th anniversary of CERN making 
the world wide web available to the world for free.

British physicist Tim Berners-Lee invented the world wide web, also 
called W3 or just the web, at CERN in 1989 to help physicists to 
share information, but at the time it was just one of several such 
information retrieval systems using the internet.

"It's one of the biggest days in the history of the web," Noyes said 
of April 30, 1993.

"CERN's gesture of giving away the web for free was what made it just explode."

Noyes said that other information sharing systems that had wanted to 
charge royalties, like the University of Minnesota's Gopher, had 
"just sort of disappeared into history".

By making the birth of the web visible again, the CERN team aims to 
emphasise the idea of freedom and openness it was built on, Noyes said.

"In the early days, you could just go in and take the code and make 
it your own and improve it. That is something we have all benefitted 
from," he said.

While CERN was not promoting any specific ideology, "we want to 
preserve that idea of openness and freedom to collect and 
collaborate," said Noyes.

AFP

This story was found at: 
http://www.theage.com.au/technology/technology-news/worlds-first-web-page-recreated-20-years-on-20130501-2irul.html 




Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
jwhit at janwhitaker.com
blog: http://janwhitaker.com/jansblog/
business: http://www.janwhitaker.com

Our truest response to the irrationality of the world is to paint or 
sing or write, for only in such response do we find truth.
~Madeline L'Engle, writer

_ __________________ _