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The Web

Entry 377, on 2006-08-07 at 16:47:05 (Rating 2, Computers)

Recently the World Wide Web was 15 years old. That's right, its just 15 years since the first simple steps were taken to building the Web the way it is today. For the first year there was significant competition with the old gopher protocol. I remember those days - I was one of the first people in this area to create a private web site. I had a site on-line by about 1994. In fact, some of the structure still exists in my current site (I had sections on astronomy, photography, wine, and other subjects).

Tim Berners-Lee, while working at CERN in Europe, created some of the original software and distributed it using old discussion channels. In 1993 the first PC web browser, Mosaic, was created by Marc Andreessen at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois. After that, things really started moving quickly, thyen we had the browser wars, and the proliferation of useful functionality supoprted by the Web today.

The initial users of the web were mainly by academic organisations such as universities. The Internet itself, originated at the US military in the 1960s. So although companies now contribute most to the Internet, it was non-profit organisations which did all the hard work originally.

One of the great things about the web is that, while commerce has exploited it for its own use today, it is still a place where individuals and non-profit, education, and academic institutions are very important. When I look through my lists of most useful sites I find a variety of backgrounds, and some of the best (wikipedia for example) aren't run by big business.

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