Happy birthday WWW

Ten years ago everybody was pretty excited about Bulletin Boards. Email was for a privileged few, and frankly, the everyone I refer to in the previous sentence was just a bunch of geeks that no one would ever think of inviting to a party or giving

Ten years ago everybody was pretty excited about Bulletin Boards. Email was for a privileged few, and frankly, the everyone I refer to in the previous sentence was just a bunch of geeks that no one would ever think of inviting to a party or giving wads of Venture Capital to. Then, on May 17 (right now in the States) Tim Berners Lee presented to C5 (Committee for Coordinating Computer Center Committees) the first talk on the World Wide Web, his brainchild for smooth and easy access to academic information.

The World Wide Web began life at CERN, or the European Organization for Nuclear Research, as a means to make sure that data need only be published once, and featuring hyperlinks for a more efficient integration of existing data. At that time the Web was only really deployed amongst CERN systems, and ran only on Unix and VMS systems, with Macintosh support to come. Interestingly, bring a browser to IBM compatible systems was then only a 'possibilty', in the words of Tim Berners Lee.

And it went crazy. Soon every man and their dog were popping pages online, and I can still remember the Web as a front page story back in 93, and my own amazement at how intuitive and useful hyperlinks were in text. Then came Mosaic, the first graphical browser, and suddenly there was all this colour on the Web. And then, not long after, came the pr0n.

Ah, ain't history grand.
The initial presentation on W3C.org