Happy 20th Birthday To … The Internet!

Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you, happy birthday dear modern day internet, happy birthday to you.

Okay, corny I know, but on April 30, 1993 the internet’s daddy Tim Berners-Lee and his employer CERN made available for free the very software that would eventually become what we now refer to as the internet.

In a statement released on the CERN website, the agency on Tuesday said:

“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.

Berners-Lee hosted the world’s first public website on his NeXT computer, and today CERN revived that website on the very same NeXT computer that ushered in the web generation.

We have come a long way since 1993, when WAIS and Gopher powered servers and easily accessible internet was just a pipe dream. Yes it is absolutely true that “internet” systems existed before CERN and Berners-Lee took them public but it was their software that gave birth to the internet as we know it today.

Here is the original world wide web page published on the NeXT computer: