Today Is The 30th Anniversary Of The World Wide Web, And It Has Quite A Story To Tell

Thirty years ago, the world changed forever. It wasn't because of a loud, bloody war, or major political shifts, but because of a quiet tapping in a little room in Geneva, Switzerland. It was here that the Internet got its very first website, and history forever altered.

And it's that very historic event Google is celebrating today, with a doodle to commemorate the beginning of digital life as we know it.

To tell it truthfully, the World Wide Web actually came online for the first time in August 6, 1991. But it was much earlier, on March 12, 1989, that it was first conceptualised by its creator, Sir Tim Berners-Lee.

And today, the web turned 30 years old.

On that fateful day in 1989, Berners-Lee submitted an official proposal to the management at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research. At the research institute, he'd been working on a new way to catalogue and share all their research data, something he first called 'Mesh'.

At @CERN, @timberners_lee speaking about the birth of the web: "I wrote the memo in 1989, and wasn't really sure who to take it to. It wasn't exactly a physics proposal..." pic.twitter.com/jvo2EdcEW6

¡ª The Web Foundation (@webfoundation) March 12, 2019

Instead of just a database with reams of text, he envisioned a revolutionary new way to link pieces of data to each other. Instead of cross-referencing digital books, Berners-Lee dreamed of a system where you could instead jump right from one piece of information to a related chunk.

World Wide Web Foundation

"Imagine, then, the references in this document all being associated with the network address of the thing to which they referred, so that while reading this document you could skip to them with a click of the mouse," he said.

In 1990 @timberners_lee and I attended the first European hypertext conference ECHT¡¯90 in Paris. Here is Tim explaining the WWW concept to my colleagues Andrew Fountain & Ian Heath with Robert Cailliau in the background. Photo by @benbendc #Web30 #ForTheWeb #Happy30thbirthday pic.twitter.com/NE18gEMROy

¡ª Wendy Hall (@DameWendyDBE) March 12, 2019

The visionary's superiors at the time were impressed by his concept, but they didn't seem to grasp just how useful it could be. "Vague, but exciting," a reviewer wrote on the cover of his proposal. In time, though, Berners-Lee's vision grew to become a sprawling landscape of information, entertainment, news, and communications that we've continued to build on for three decades.

In fact, it was CERN's own website that went online first, as part of the demonstration. This page here, is what it would have looked like had you walked into CERN in 1991 and opened up its network. That's a modernised version too. The picture below is what it actually looked like.

That website, when it came online, was literally the entire Internet at the time, and it was all stored on Berners-Lee's computer at CERN. Even today, the same server has been maintained for posterity.

To celebrate this anniversary, the father of the Internet is now taking a 30-hour tour across the world, in collaboration with the World Wide Web Foundation. They're also trying to build a Twitter timeline of the Internet's history between March 12-13, with each hour representing a year in the Internet's life. This link shows you how you can contribute.

And if you're feeling particularly nostalgic, here's a Spotify playlist the organisation compiled, of all the hit songs at the time Tim Berners-Lee wrote his historic paper. That way you can think of all those songs playing on the radio at the time and marvel at how you're free to download and even stream them now whenever you like.