jan 1, 1989 - The World Wide Web - Tim Berners-Lee: First widely available hypertext (clickable links) system.
Description:
In the early days of the net, the main application-level protocols were Telnet, which allowed a user to log in remotely to another computer, and FTP (File Transfer Protocol), for copying files from one computer to another. FTP is great if you already know what you're looking for, and exactly where it is in the other computer's file system.
Several people had the idea of a system that would allow users to embed links to files into a conversation, so you could say "I think this document might help you." In 1945, Vannevar Bush described a hypothetical device with the ability to embed links in files. In 1963, Ted Nelson made up the word "hypertext" as the name for this feature, but the first actual implementation was Douglas Engelbart's system NLS, developed starting in 1963 and demonstrated in 1968.
In 1989, physicist Tim Berners-Lee implemented a hypertext system and named it the World Wide Web. At first it was used only by physicists, to share data and ideas. But by then the Internet was running, so his timing was right, and the name was much more appealing than the technical-sounding "hypertext". The growth of the Web was very rapid, from about 500 servers in 1993 to over 10,000 in 1994. Today, many people talk as if "the Internet" and "the Web" were the same thing, though they are not.
Berners-Lee's vision was of a Web in which everyone would be both a creator and a consumer of information. But the Web quickly became a largely one-way communication, with a few commercial web sites getting most of the traffic. Today, most Web traffic goes to Google, Facebook, CNN, Amazon, and a few others. But some degree of democracy came back to the Web with the invention of the blog (short for "web log") in which ordinary people can post their opinions and hope that other people will notice them.
Added to timeline:
History of Computers
Date:
