Twenty years ago this month, something happened at CERN that would change the world forever: Tim Berners-Lee handed a document to his supervisor Mike Sendall entitled "Information Management : a Proposal". "Vague, but exciting" is how Mike described it, and he gave Tim the nod to take his proposal forward. The following year, the World Wide Web was born.
They are having a celebration today over there where Tim Berners-Lee will speak.
When I tug on my ever-greying-beard a bit, I can think back to the some of the "Intro to the Internet" courses I taught in the Boston corporate market (primarily) back in the very early 1990's. The courseware I wrote had a section at the end that talked about this new thing, called the "World-Wide Web" that you used by telnetting to info.cern.ch and navigating through a "line-mode browser" by typing the number of the link you wanted to follow. This was, of course, the era of "gopher", "archie", "veronica", etc. so this new "www" thing was an interesting addition.
And then, of course, came Mosaic in 1993 and everything changed... (including my courseware! ;-) )
Happy Birthday, World Wide Web! And thanks, Tim Berners-Lee, for writing that first proposal...
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