World Wide Web: Some interesting facts

Internet has become a part of our lives. Technology is making exponential progress. Messages, pictures and documents can be send to any part of the world in seconds. Paperless transactions of money can be done within minutes. We can get in touch with our friends and others live through internet.

The World Wide Web or WWW as it is popularly referred was conceived in 1989 by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN. It was invented to share documents among the scientific community across the globe using hyperlinks. And now it has reached the common man and there are at present about 4 billion people across the globe use internet.

First website went online at CERN in 1991. Since at that time Tim Berners-Lee and his colleagues had browsers, few people in the world are aware. Today there are about 1.9 billion websites.

The term “Surfing the net” was coined by Jean Armour Polly a librarian in the university of Minnesota Wilson library in March 1992.

First email was sent by computer engineer Ray Tomlinson in 1971 from one computer to another sitting right next to it at Cambridge Massachusetts but through a network of computers.

First image was uploaded by Tim Berners-Lee on to internet in 1992. Photo was of a parody pop band “Les Horribles Cernettes“.

Internet is not WWW alone. It is much bigger and WWW, email and internet telephony are some of its parts.