Today, the World Wide Web is celebrating its 30th birthday.
Google has been attributing its “Sketch of the Day” to the 30th birthday of the WWW, as co-founder Tim Berners-Lee spoke his opinions on the web as it stands today.
The history of connecting computers together, however, extends further than the web. But the World Wide Web would eventually bring the internet into many homes, schools and businesses worldwide.
The history of transferring data between computers dates back to the 1950s, where “teleprocessing” was a buzz-word coined by IBM for using telephone lines to move data between mainframes using telephone lines. Prior to that, although not used in computing, AT&T (Bell System) owned the Teletype Corporation, a manufacturer of printers that could reproduce documents and other data sent over telephone lines.
1962 marked the first time computer data was relayed using a satellite. Using an IBM mainframe, data was successfully relayed using the Bell System’s TELSTAR satellite. It took nearly 30 minutes to relay the data. (See more here.)
My History
Of course, my introduction to the internet (and computers in general) have been captured on this website. You can learn that story here.
30 years of the web has brought a lot of change into our world. From MySpace to Facebook to Twitter to SnapChat, socialization has changed from one-on-one conversations to posting your thoughts online or entering a chat room. While the internet has improved our world, it has also brought some headaches to it, as well.
Who knows, however, what the next 30 years will hold for the World Wide Web? What will be the next social media site everyone’s talking about? How will eCommerce shape the next 30 years? We’ll have to see… and I can post about it 30 years from now.