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Happy 20th Birthday, Interwebz!

by Warren Riddle on March 13, 2009 at 08:21 PM

Al Gore may not agree, but this week marks the anniversary of the birth of the Web. 20 years ago, on March 13, 1989, Tim Berners-Lee, a researcher for the European Organization for Nuclear Research lab outside of Geneva, Switzerland, proposed an idea to counter data-loss at CERN due to personnel turnover and incompatible computers. In the proposal, Berners-Lee described the predicament by stating, "When two years is a typical length of stay, information is constantly being lost... The technical details of past projects are sometimes lost forever, or only recovered after a detective investigation in an emergency. Often, the information has been recorded, it just cannot be found."

To combat the information dilemma, Berners-Lee drafted his manifesto "Information Management: A Proposal." In his script, Berners-Lee suggested that we "should work toward a universal linked information system," and that "the aim would be to allow a place to be found for any information or reference which one felt was important, and a way of finding it afterward." Using remarkable foresight, Berners-Lee's proposal would take a few years to take shape, as pioneers such as Jim Clark and Marc Andreessen of Netscape paved the way for casual surfing.

So even though Al Gore may have said "I took the initiative in creating the Internet," give Berners-Lee his due credit this weekend as you search for random videos of people doing ridiculous things. Oh, how proud he must be of how far his baby has come. [From: Cnet News]

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Tags: al gore, AlGore, cern, internet, internet history, InternetHistory, tim berners-lee, TimBerners-lee

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