blog.

It's 20 years since the web became a publicly available service on the internet. So I thought it would be interesting to take a look into the humble beginnings of a service which now has over 200 million websites, over 1 trillion unique URLS and 1.6 billion users.

The web was created by the british engineer and computer scientist Tim Berner-Lee in the late 80s early 90s whilst working at CERN in Geneva. Believe it or not this was the first ever web site published by Berner-Lee in 1991 and almost a year later this was the first photo ever published online to advertise the CERN music club.

At the beginning the web was slow to catch on with only scientists publishing pages, in 1993 there were only 130 websites. Amusingly one of the first uses Cambridge University scientists found for the incredible tool they now had at their disposal was to set up a video capture board that took a picture of their coffee pot in the kitchen every second, so they would know if it was worth leaving their labs and walking down 3 flights of stairs for a break. But that did lead to the birth of the web cam, so maybe we should be grateful! 

We've all recently lived through the next evolution of the web - the use of broadband and high speed internet connections. Five years ago only 7% of us had a broadband connection now that is 95.1%, which means more multimedia content has been able to take off - hence YouTube's recent spike in popularity in the last 5 years. 

And what about the future of the web? Well we'll have to wait and see, but at the moment there are still 9 million people in the UK alone who've never used the web. Race Online 2012 and BBC Connect are working to try to change that but we can all help to share the amazing resource Tim Berner-Lee created so that it can keep getting bigger and better!