Web Performance News : February 24, 2014 – LoadStorm

Neither did we. The World Wide Web is getting ready to turn 25 this year. One notable contributor we can thank for the advancement of the Internet is Tim Berners-Lee. Back in 1989, Tim was a British computer Scientist in Switzerland at CERN. Often times researchers were wasting time by spending weeks solving an issue, only to find out that it had already been done years earlier by another researcher. Concerned by the constant loss of data, he made a proposal for an information management system. A system of interlinked documents that can be accessed via the Internet using a web browser. He proposed a uniform resource locator (URL).

On the W3 page, Tim gave more insight on why he created the World Wide Web.”Well, I found it frustrating that in those days, there was different information on different computers, but you had to log on to different computers to get at it. Also, sometimes you had to learn a different program on each computer. So finding out how things worked was really difficult. Often it was just easier to go and ask people when they were having coffee.

Because people at CERN came from universities all over the world, they brought with them all types of computers. Not just Unix, Mac and PC: there were all kinds of big mainframe computer and medium sized computers running all sorts of software.

I actually wrote some programs to take information from one system and convert it so it could be inserted into another system. More than once. And when you are a programmer, and you solve one problem and then you solve one that’s very similar, you often think, “Isn’t there a better way? Can’t we just fix this problem for good?” That became “Can’t we convert every information system so that it looks like part of some imaginary information system which everyone can read?” And that became the WWW.”

Bridging The Gap

The creation of the World Wide Web has transformed the way that we conduct our daily lives. Did you get that snail mail from your friend on his/her recent travels? Most likely not because it’s in the form of email, Skype, and Facebook. Renting a movie at BlockBuster? No way José. They’re bankrupt thanks to you using Netflix. Starting a revolution? On the web, social media has been used as a tool for the recent political activity for citizens in Ukraine and Venezuela. Try to go one day without using the Web. You’ll be surprised at how much you depend on it.

Interconnected

Pew Research Center is the authoritative source on the evolution of the Internet. Surveys are conducted to examine how Americans use the internet and how their activities affect their lives. the chart above to the left, showed that 46% of Americans say the Internet would be the toughest technological activity to give up. Since the beginning of 1995, we can also see the strong linear growth of Americans using the internet. From 1995 to 2000, there was a 32% increase, followed by a 20% increase from 2000 to 2005. Judging from the pattern, we can expect to see 99% of adults using the Internet by 2020.

Before The Big W3

Tim Berners-Lee will certainly be remembered throughout history for his idea of the World Wide Web. To find out more about the Internet prior to the World Wide Web, this video does a fantastic job with its unique animation: