Today — 6 August — is one of the contending dates for when the World Wide Web was born. On this date in 1991 the English software developer Tim Berners-Lee, who was employed at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research in Switzerland, sent the post “WorldWideWeb – Executive Summary” to the newsgroup alt.hypertext. WWW was now publicly available. Berners-Lee’s original post can be found in the Internet Archive.
However, 6 Aug 1991 is only one possible date for the birth of the web. I discuss other possible dates in the article “Introduction: The Web’s first 25years” (New Media & Society, 18(7), 1059-65). I argue that in particular in relation to technological innovations instead of trying to identify a specific date to celebrate it is better to understand technological innovations as something that emerges during a period of formation. In relation to the web in the article mentioned above I argue “that a catalogue of the defining moments in such a history should probably include the following six moments”: When Tim Berners-Lee first circulated the draft proposal at CERN (1989-90), when the first code was written (1990-91), when the code was released for the first time (6 Aug 1991), when CERN made the WWW software royalty free and available in the public domain (1993), when the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) was founded (1994), or when the web started to expand (1995).
Therefore, the web’s birthday stretches over a period of almost 7 years, with 6 Aug 1991 as one of the crucial dates.
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