At 9.37am exactly 21 years ago today, a researcher at CERN – the big hole in the ground in Switzerland that brought you the Higgs Boson – posted an entry on alt.hypertext.
His name was Tim Berners-Lee, and he had invented the world wide web.
It has changed the world so dramatically that younger readers may need to be reminded of what happened. The internet (which already existed) is not the same thing as the web, but the web – a series of linked hypertext documents accessed through browsers – is what made it accessible to most people. If one thinks of the internet as writing, what Sir Tim, as he now is, created was like the invention of the postal system.
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