The World Wide Web is a global network of information resources, most of which are hypertext. Hypertext documents hosted in
the world wide web are called web pages. Several web pages dedicated to the same topic, having a common design, and also linked by links and usually located on the same web server are called a site.
The World Wide Web Project and its Creators
The modern concept of the Internet originated in 1989 at the European Council for Nuclear Research - CERN. It was proposed by the renowned British scientist Timothy John Berners-Lee. At the time, the young inventor was working at CERN as a software consultant and developing a program for the exchange of research results, information retrieval and analysis.
The future "father of the world wide web" Timothy John Berners-Lee was born in London on June 8, 1955. His parents worked at the University of Manchester and took part in the creation of one of the first computers - the Manchester Mark I.
The internal document exchange system Enquire was used (Berners-Lee began work on this software back in 1980), which used the hypertext language. She subsequently formed the basis of the World Wide Web (WWW) project. In the next two years, work on the development of the World Wide Web continued. Berners-Lee presented the HTTP protocol, HTML language, and URIs for broad discussion. Senior colleagues were initially skeptical about the project. In addition, hypertext was extremely slow to load. The burden of creating and untangling links fell on Timothy and his students.
The co-author and right-hand man of Berners-Lee was the Belgian Robert Cailliagu (later the Americans shortened this surname to Caio), a man with an inexhaustible supply of optimism and an amazing sense of humor. He took over the organization of the process and managed to get funding for the work. It was with the advent of Robert Caio that WWW was finally separated into a separate project.
Birthday of the first site
In late 1990, Berners-Lee created the first NeXTcube-based hypertext browser and server. The first web pages appeared, and already in May 1991 the World Wide Web standard was approved at CERN. The main work on the project was completed, and on August 6, Tim John Berners-Lee published the world's first website. In those days, there was still no web graphics or flash animation. The site looked very laconic. Its pages consisted of plain text on a white background and hyperlinks.
On October 29, 1969, a communication session was held between the University of California and the Stanford Research Institute, located at a distance of 640 km from each other. This date is considered the birthday of the Internet.
The site published an article on the principles of the World Wide Web, which talked about the hypertext markup language HTML. It also explained how to work with the HTTP data transfer protocol and the URL addressing system. It also covered how to install web servers and how browsers work. Later, links to other resources were inserted there. This is how the site became the first Internet directory.
The web pages have been rewritten and redesigned several times, so the original version, unfortunately, has not survived. But in 2013, a later revision of the site from 1992 was restored. It is available today at info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html.
On August 28, 1990, the network of the Institute of Atomic Energy. IV Kurchatov and IPK Minavtoprom, which united a group of physicists and programmers, connected to the world Internet network, laying the foundation for modern Russian networks.
And the "home" of the created site was https://info.cern.ch/. By typing this address in your browser, you will be taken to a page where you will be offered a menu in English, consisting of four items. You can:
- see how the first site looked;
- view the first site with command line simulation;
- read about the birth of the Internet;
- go to the modern site of CERN - the physical laboratory, in the depths of which the web was created.
First browser users could edit and modify content. This is no longer possible in modern web browsers.
In 1993, the famous NCSA Mosaic web browser appeared with a full-featured graphical interface. It was created by American engineer Mark Andreessen. After that, the Internet network began to rapidly gain popularity. Already in 1997, it had over 11 million computers and about 1 million domain names were registered.
The first photo on the Internet
The very first photo appeared on the Internet on July 18, 1992. It was uploaded by the founder of the world wide web, Tim Berners-Lee. Pictured above is the parody music group Les Horribles Cernettes. This group of four adorable girls was created in 1990 by CERN employee Michelle de Gennaro. All members of the team worked in the same organization. Les Horribles Cernettes is the first music group to have a personal website.
Photo in
The photo was taken by CERN IT developer Silvano de Gennaro after the girls performed their own song at the CERN Hardronic Festival. At that time, CERN nuclear physicists, forgetting about their loved ones, were enthusiastically working on the creation of the Large Hadron Collider. The melodic song about sad lonely nights and an insidious collider, a lovebird, quickly became a hit. Later, other songs were written about the everyday life of scientists, with whom the group performed at many events, and the group called itself "the first and only high-energy rock band."
