The Daily Dot would like to wish a very happy birthday to the World Wide Web.
On this day 21 years ago, World Wide Web went from a theoretical idea to a practical facility for turning hypertext and links into a viable Web—and you look great. In fact, some would say you look about better than ever.
August 20 marks the 21st anniversary of British computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee’s Newsgroup post entitled “WorldWideWeb wide-area hypertext app available,” a six paragraph victory lap that changed the world as we knew it. The post announced the launch of a “hypertext browser/editor which allows one to read information from local files and remote servers.
“It allows hypertext links to be made and traversed, and also remote indexes to be interrogated for lists of useful documents. Local files may be edited, and links made from areas of text to other files, remote files, remote indexes, remote index searched, internet news groups and articles.”
And in the future: cats, porn, and a welcome combination of the two, in the form of swimsuit model Kate Upton doing the Cat Daddy.
Internet folklore often lists the World Wide Web’s birthday as Aug. 6, but Daily Dot’s Grant Robertson explains the confusion as such:
“The announcement on Aug. 6, 1991 to comp.hypertext was more theoretical (“Hey, why not link hypertext over the Internet?”) where the announcement on Aug. 20, 1991 was practical (“Hey, here’s source and binaries for a server and clients which can turn hypertext into a viable ‘web’ and anyone can try it out.”). Basically, this is the 21st birthday of the moment that the idea became downloadable software someone could actually use.”
Wait, did somebody say 21? Get down, World Wide Web. Have yourself a party.
Photo via RileyRoxx/Flickr