The Internet Turns 20

The name Tim Berners-Lee is not a household name, but what he created 20 years ago is. The World Wide Web started humbly enough as a technical paper presented by Berners-Lee in Switzerland, and has become the ubiquitous backdrop of enterprise and entertainment over the last twenty years.

According to a recent Boston Globe article this is the timeline of the creation of the Web:

March 1989 - Tim Berners-Lee's research paper is presented at Conseil European pour la Recherche Nucleaire (CERN) and lays out the basic principles of the World Wide Web.

December 1990 - Berners-Lee creates the first browser to be used by scientist at his Swiss research group. It is very technical and requires typed commands to navigate from page to page.

February 1991 - America Online turns its attention from computer games to launch its first AOL DOS version.

January 1993 - The browser Mosaic is created by University of Illinois students, Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina. Their browser was the first to display photos and graphics, and most importantly could be controlled by using a mouse.

Janauary 1994 - Yahoo! is created by Stanford graduate Yang and David Filo. Yahoo! stands for "Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle".

May 1994 - Computer entrepreneur Jim Clark created Netscape Communications Corp., the first commercial browser company. "There were a lot of people who thought I was absolutely nuts," Clark said. "The Internet is free. How was I going to make any money out of this business?" Netscape's ability to encrypt financial transactions gave rise to such online retailers as eBay and Amazon.

July 1995 - Amazon.com is launched.

September 1995 - eBay is launched.

September 1998 - Google is launched.

January 2001 - Wikipedia is launched.

August 2003 - MySpace is launched.

February 2004 - Facebook is launched.

February 2005 - YouTube is launched.

2009 - 1.5 billion people around the world use the Internet.

Perhaps one of the most remarkable things about Berners-Lee's creation is his insistence that it be free. He refused to patent it. "It took 18 months for my colleague Robert Cailliau and me to persuade the CERN directors not to charge royalties for use of the Web," Berners-Lee said last year. "Had we failed, the Web would not be here today."

In the last twenty years, PC and Apple fans and companies have argued over superiority and a never-before-imagined global economy and community has been created. It is difficult to imagine the world before email, blogs and instant messaging. Could anyone have imagined Twittering in 1989?

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