The World Wide Web has changed the way each of us lives our lives, even if we do not interact with it directly. The web is 20 years old this weekend, so at this point we can look back on some important milestones.
It was back on August 6th, 1991 that Tim Berners-Lee posted links to his text-based project, called the World Wide Web (WWW), on a discussion forum called alt.hypertext. It was something he had been working on at his physics lab in Geneva since 1989. It wasn’t until 1993 that the first graphical web browser, Mosaic, came to life, this time as part of a program that was, indeed, started by then-Senator Al Gore.
When Mosaic appeared, suddenly the potential of the WWW became apparent–integrated multimedia was suddenly possible through the medium. By 1996, everybody was online and e-commerce was booming. Google was becoming the premier search engine with its simple interface and keyword-based algorithm ranking system.
In 2002, Friendster became the first successful social networking website. It was designed as a social gaming site, and allowed the creation of user profiles, media, sharing–essentially the functionality that we take for granted on all the social networks of today.
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