As a nineteen-year-old, it’s hard to imagine life without the internet. It seems like almost every aspect of my life is intertwined on the web. From picking my next book to planning a weekend trip with my friends, the World Wide Web offers me information on everything. So how did something so expansive get its start, and how did it go from a few sites to holding valuable information on just about every topic and philosophy there is?
Oxford University graduate, Tim Berners-Lee, is responsible for this truly groundbreaking creation. As a software engineer at CERN, Tim became increasingly frustrated by the difficult task that was sharing information back and forth with other engineers and scientists. This is where the World Wide Web got its original purpose. In the early spring of 1989, Tim wrote a document called “Information Management: A Proposal”, which laid out his early idea of creating a universal system that allowed all employees access to information from a variety of studies and experiments. Surprisingly, Tim’s idea didn’t catch the attention of many of his coworkers; however, his boss decided to give him time to work on the complex idea and strengthen the ways in which it would work. By the end of 1990, Berners-Lee had developed the three fundamental components of the Web: HTML (HyperText Markup Language), URI (Uniform Resource Identifier), and HTTP (HypeText Transfer Protocol). Now, Tim was onto something! Just after these developments, the first web page was published and in early 1991, people were invited to join the new Web community. It was off to an incredible start, but it was 1993 that sent the Web into an entirely new era of innovation. The Web offered the platform for sharing information, but it wasn’t very user-friendly. This is where Marc Andreessen came in. He developed a Web browser called Mosaic which used the “point-and-click” graphics manipulations to allow for easier Web surfing. At this same time, CERN announced that the Web would be FREE and open to the public. This was historical because it meant that anyone with access to a basic computer had access to any and all public sites published on the Web. At this point, both companies and the everyday person were hungry to get their hands on this new technology and by 2014, two in five people were using the Web daily.
So how fast did it grow exactly? Well in June of 1993, there were only 130 websites; however, in December of the same year, the number of websites doubled. In 1994, there were over 2,700 sites and within 4 years it leaped to 650,000. Today there are over one billion sites and growing. With this massive expansion of shared information, hundreds of thousands of topics were/are being discussed, viewed, and shared. There are two main industries, however, that have felt the impact like no other: Healthcare and learning/teaching. In a study called, “The Doctor, the patient and the world-wide-web: how the internet is changing healthcare”, they pointed out that a survey showed that 60-80% of web users have searched it for health information and two-thirds of web users looking for said health information has claimed it had an impact on their healthcare decisions. Beyond that, teaching and learning have changed in hundreds of ways. In a study by Farrokh Mamaghani, he expressed the benefits of online courses and how the low cost and easy accessibility offer an option for hundreds of less fortunate people to have access to otherwise unavailable education. Mamaghani also explained that the Web has allowed students to study and use resources in ways never done before, for example, Khan Academy (a free math and science educational tutoring program) has allowed kids to improve or study math and science when their teacher isn’t readily available. The use of technology with the web has also given younger generations so much visual stimulation that they tend to be primarily visual learners.
The web is still changing and improving today! Within several years/decades, we can expect to see the first open-access educational classes, wearable technology that connects directly to the web (such as glasses) and even improved intelligent personal assistants. The web is at this point, unavoidable for the everyday American, and it will only continue to attach itself to the other more distant aspects of our lives.
Sources:
What Will the Future Internet Look Like?
The Doctor, the Patient and the World-Wide Web: How the Internet Is Changing Healthcare
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