The World Wide Web turns 35 years old today....

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On August 6, 1991, in a little-known newsgroup–an early-days, primitive version of an internet forum–called alt.hypertext, a soon-to-be-famous computer scientist posted something that would change the technology landscape—and the world—as we knew it. It was a response to a query from one of his fellow newsgroup nerds, who asked if anyone knew of development efforts in the form of “hypertext links enabling retrieval from multiple heterogeneous sources of information?” In other words, could the early Internet become easier to join and navigate?

Tim Berners-Lee, a British computer scientist at CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research), used that forum to announce to the world his new initiative, writing, “The WorldWideWeb (WWW) project aims to allow links to be made to any information anywhere. The address format includes an access method (=namespace), and for most name spaces a hostname and some sort of path.” Before Berners-Lee’s novel idea, to navigate the internet required knowing specific protocols like Telnet or FTP to connect to other servers, which did not have friendly names like popsci.com, but rather arcane computer names that could not easily be discovered. Online discussions involved participating in message-based bulletin board systems enabled by services like Usenet or CompuServe.

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