On its 30th anniversary, the Internet now has 1,8 billion websites
It's 30 years since Tim Berners Lee, a young English software engineer, launched the world's first website, while working at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research.
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Most people who search on Google, share on Facebook and shop on Amazon have never heard of Sir Tim Berners-Lee. But they might not be doing any of those things had he not invented the World Wide Web.
In1989, Berners-Lee began working on ways to identify digital objects and retrieve them through browser software capable of rendering graphics and other images.
He published a proposal on March 12, 1989, opening the way to a technological revolution that has transformed the way people buy goods, share ideas, get information and much more.
On August 6, 1991, he launched the world's first website, http://info.cern.ch , it was dedicated to information on his World Wide Web project.
It's estimated there are now over 1.8 billion websites.
Berners-Lee decided against patenting his technology and instead offered it as royalty-free software.
That allowed other programmers to build upon the foundation he'd laid, spawning more than a billion websites today that have helped lure more than 3 billion people online.
In today’s world, access to the internet is a lifeline. It should be a basic right. https://t.co/4UDLFD4AFN pic.twitter.com/IRXvCw28Hx
— Tim Berners-Lee (@timberners_lee) June 2, 2021
In an interview with The Associated Press in 2019, Berners-Lee explained why he had recently released an ambitious rule book for governing online conduct.
It was a bill of rights and obligations for the internet - designed to counteract the growing prevalence of misinformation, mass surveillance and government censorship.
"There's a sense that some of these questions were really hard," said Berners-Lee.
"This new world in which so much of our society is actually determined by how social networks work and so on is new. And there's no rule book written a hundred years ago.
"So, this is, in a way, the first time we've had a rule book in which responsibility is being shared."
(with AP)
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