World Wide Web Turns 20 Today

CYBERSPACE—Today is the 20 year anniversary of the birth of the World Wide Web as a thing available to anyone to use for free, provided they can keep it free. In that sense, it shares something uniquely revolutionary and evolutionary with July 4, 1776. And what an adventure it's been. For the adult industry, the preceeding two decades have been profoundly impactful in ways both opportunistic and disruptive, to say the least. The same can certainly be said of most other businesses. Few could have possibly realized how globally immersive the web would become when it was first proposed by British physicist Tim Berners-Lee in March 1989 to improve collaborative efficiency at CERN, a European laboratory for particle physics. Originally, the idea was “to develop a distributed information system for CERN physicists and engineers. It described a way of managing information about the accelerators and experiments at the laboratory using a system of documents linked together and accessible via the internet.” Following a few years of internal use and development, “CERN published a statement on April 30, 1994 that made World Wide Web (‘W3’, or simply ‘the web’) technology available on a royalty-free basis. By making the software required to run a web server freely available, along with a basic browser and a library of code, the web was allowed to flourish.” A history of how the first incarnations of the CERN web became a technology ready for unfettered global distribution was published today by CERN, which also celebrated the birthday by resurrecting Info.cern.ch—the world’s first website. The CERN birthday page can be found here. Image: A portion of Tim Berners-Lee’s original memo proposing the “Information Management” system that would eventually become the World Wide Web, courtesy of CERN.