About the World Wide Web

More and more areas of human activities are using the new possibilities given by the computer world.

The first personal computers appeared in 1981. Computer networks were created in order to exchange information between them, first by the American Military Forces, then by scientiests in the whole World. In 1990 formed the world computer network that is known as Internet, and one of its services is called World Wide Web.

The World Wide Web was invented by Timothy Berners-Lee while he was working at CERN. He coined the name "World Wide Web," wrote the first World Wide Web server, "httpd," and the first client program (a browser and editor), "WorldWideWeb," in October 1990. He wrote the first version of the document formatting language with the capability for hypertext links, known as HTML (HyperText Markup Language). His initial specifications for URIs, HTTP, and HTML were refined and discussed in larger circles as Web technology spread.

In 1993 CERN announced that the World Wide Web would be free to anyone, with no fees due. The introduction of browsers alowed easy mixing of graphics with text, which became crucial for the spread of the popularity of the Web.

On the July 16 2004 he was dubbed a Knight Commander, Order of the British Empire (KBE) by the Queen Elizabeth II in recognition for his "services to the global development of the Internet" through his invention of the World Wide Web, a system to organize, link, and browse Internet pages.

The positive impact of the Web is beyond any original expectations, but it also gave birth to a new kind of criminal activities. In the recent years it became clear that it is not just individual vandalism, but organised criminality of a large scale. Well organized groups of people are arranging theft of indentities, credit card details and other data or are tricking other people into paying for services or goods that do not exist. Some attacks are able to bring down a whole country and may undermine the whole internet. The situation is very serious, and the ways of tackling it have been discussed at the World Economic Forum in Davos in January of 2009.

The continuing development of new technologies is enabling wider and wider use of the Web in every field. Searching machines, especially Google Search, made the World Wide Web a great searchable source of information.

There is an academic institution - MIT's Media Lab - that has just celebrated its 25th anniversary and is behind some technological breakthroughs: "The place where crazy inventors create your future".