Things you probably didn’t know about the Web

Here are the Techovy review teams’ curated list of things you probably didn’t about that fascinating discovery we use in our daily loves known as the world wide web.

1. Berners-Lee is the son of British mathematicians and computer scientists Mary Lee Woods and Conway Berners-Lee, who worked on the first commercially-built electronic computer, the Ferranti Mark 1.

2. In college, Berners-Lee built a computer out of an old television set.

3. The Web was not Berners-Lee’s first design for a system to link information. In 1980 he wrote ENQUIRE, whose name came from a Victorian era how-to book called “Enquire Within Upon Everything” owned by Berners-Lee’s parents while he was growing up. The ENQUIRE code has been lost to history.

4. Before settling on “the Web,” Berners-Lee thought of the names “Information Mesh”, “The Information Mine”, and “Mine of Information”.

5. The Web was first described in a March 1989 proposal from Berners-Lee while at CERN. In it he wrote, “In providing a system for manipulating this sort of information, the hope would be to allow a pool of information to develop which could grow and evolve with the organisation and the projects it describes. For this to be possible, the method of storage must not place its own restraints on the information. This is why a “web” of notes with links (like references) between them is far more useful than a fixed hierarchical system.”

6. Mike Sendall, Berners-Lee’s manager at the time, commented on the original proposal “Vague, but exciting.” Fortunately, Sendall thought enough of the proposal to allow Berners-Lee to work on it on the side.

7. In 1990, Berners-Lee wrote the first browser and editor, called “WorldWideWeb.app,” which ran on a NeXT computer. Steve Jobs had left Apple to create NeXT Inc., and later returned to Apple.

8. WorldWideWeb.app, which took 2 months to write, was also an editor, so the earliest vision of the Web was one where anyone could contribute.

9. The first Web site was info.cern.ch, hosted by CERN, on Tim’s desktop computer.

10. The early Web pages from 1992 were preserved by Berners-Lee and W3C, but CERN did not serve them at the original address until in April 2013.

If you love technology then you will love all the content and eBooks you can find at Techovy.