Tim Berners-Lee released a paper on March 12, 1989 describing how a world wide web would work. The implementation of it did not occur until December 1991. Some are celebrating March 12, 2014 as the 25th birthday of the World Wide Web and others of us will celebrate it in December 2015. I tend to treat ages of things like I do humans of when they exist and not when the idea is conceived.
The World Wide Web (WWW) is an add-on to the Internet that allows us to have web pages that shows text and pictures and other stuff and has links in the pages from one page to other web pages (hyperlinks). It operates off the HTML computer language primarily.
This is not the 25th birthday of the Internet but the WWW. The WWW gave the ability for normal people to use the Internet as no longer did you have to know the number addresses of sites but we can use names like www.dwightwatt.com and that pages are more than plain text. Notice the www in most web page names which is acronym for World Wide Web and is the name usually given for the server with the web pages on it.
The Internet was created in August 1969 when signals of data were sent between different computer networks by Robert Metcalfe and his team with support from ARPA the USA Defense department Advance Research Projects Agency. For many years you could only view pages of plain text and had to know the IP address where information was such as 192.168.3.1 and was effectively used only by academics, the military and government for mostly research and military capabilities.
The World Wide Web made the internet fully usable by almost everyone. There are a few people I know that still do not use the Internet but they occasionally ask me or others to get information from the Internet. The Internet is a wonderful source and way of sharing information, but remember anybody can post anything and there is no Internet/World Wide Web police or group making sure it is correct or accurate.
Dwight
TO SUBSCRIBE This is a little article I am doing across the Internet of my personal opinions. This reflects my personal thoughts. I try to write several times a month on a variety of subjects. It may be religious at times, political at times, and at other times just my reactions on something happening out there. It will often be like an op-ed article. If I do what I intend, you will at times want to shout I agree, other times you will want to say Dwight has really lost it now, but most importantly I want to challenge you to think. Feel free to forward this to others. If you don't want to get this e-mail let me know. Feel free to use what you read from me, but I request you give me credit and send a tear sheet if published in a newspaper or magazine. Thanks. If you would like to receive it and you are not on my mailing list, you can subscribe at