Jacob Robertson
Media Law and Literacy
10/5/20
The Importance of the World Wide Web
The World Wide Web was created by Tim Berners-Lee, a software engineer, originally to help scientists share and transfer information across the world without as much hassle. This led him to try and create a database of sorts, which was the first web page ever created. In the year 1990 Berners-Lee finalized the idea for the web at CERN, the group of scientists that he worked for. CERN was an organization of scientists and researchers that spanned across the world in a number of different settings. Some were at colleges or universities while others were at research centers, but what made sharing information with them difficult was the fact that these members were all over the world. Berners-Lee wanted to try and make this easier for people to get access to their information and ended up creating a huge part of the internet as we know it today. Besides coming up with the idea for the web, Berners-Lee also wrote three technologies that are still the basis of the world wide web today. He created the HTML language as well as the URI and HTTP that are still present in web links today. The URI is how the internet keeps track of all of the different assets on the web, while HTTP allows you to bring up those assets. The first server came online at the end of 1990 at the CERN headquarters and a second server followed the next year in America at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center. As more and more servers began to pop up, Berners-Lee realized that CERN couldn’t handle all of this work alone and so he turned to the internet for help. People saw the idea for the web and wanted to help work on it, giving the project more and more traction. At the end of 1994 there were more than 10,000 servers across the world and millions of users. The world wide web took off from there, growing bigger and bigger until it grew into what it is today. The importance of the World Wide Web is the fact that the work that Berners-Lee did laid the groundwork for the web pages and internet that we all use today. Berners-Lee set up the International World Wide Web Consortium, which was created to protect the internet from being privatized or having its access restricted. Berners-Lee knew other people would want to work with this code, and so he made it public for all to use and alter. These actions are what gave us the World Wide Web that we all know and use every day. (Tim Berners-Lee pictured below at CERN)
