Web 25 years ago the first site was put online by Cern – The Messenger

One small step for CERN, one giant leap for mankind. Playing with the famous phrase of Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon, you can explain another great discovery comparable to electricity, the airplane and the telephone: the first website. It was info.cern.ch. put online by the Geneva Research Centre August 6, 1991 after the computer Tim Berners-Lee in March 1989 had lodged a document with his idea of ​​the Network, an idea that has revolutionized the way we live, communicate, the economy and information. A distance of 25 years in the world there are over a billion sites and almost 3.5 billion users. The purpose of Berners-Lee was to create a system to connect computers of the centers of research and share information, a kind of online database that could be accessed from any computer.

Work on hypertext, the textual pages linked to each other by a link, and in these connections recognizes the base to the web along with Robert Caillau, the Belgian computer that supported him. He writes the first server on its Next Cube, one of the computer created by Steve Jobs after leaving the Apple. And along with this also the first browser, WorldWideWeb, thus coining the name by which the network will be recognized. The WorldWideWeb browser is anything but primitive: it has a nice graphical user interface and allows you to download images, sounds and movies. The problem is that it only runs on OS Step, the Next operating system, and above all it needs a high-level computer, too expensive for users. So mere mortals will have to wait for the release of the Mosaic browser University of Illinois, in 1993, to begin to experience the first web. 30 April of that year, CERN released the source code of the information system, allowing everyone to not only access but to build browser, client, server. To create, in short, that www on which today we spend most of our days. In 1995 the sites in the world were less than 25 thousand but by 1996 had grown by 10 times. While the first million was reached in 1999.


 A real boom there was between 2011 and 2012, when the number of sites has increased from about 350 thousand to almost 700 thousand. The milestone of one billion websites in the world was reached in 2014: to certify the ‘counter Internet Live Stats now marks almost 1 billion and 61 million and about 3.5 billion active users. To make live a second youth to the web has been the exponential spread of social networks and mobile devices. To understand how it changed the world in 25 years, just take a look just to counter Internet Live Stats: until now were made over three billion searches on Google, sent almost 425 thousand tweets, uploaded to Instagram almost 43 billion of photos. All this has generated so far almost more than two billion GB of traffic. And according to a report by Cisco, by 2020 there will be more people connected with phones with no electricity or running water. A deluge of mobile data driven by video.