When a wise man gets asked what impacts humans the most, the internet is sure to be somewhere in his answer. Just look at how you spend your day. As soon as you wake up, you lunge towards your phone to see if any of your loved ones have sent you messages on online messaging apps such as Facebook, Messenger and WhatsApp. Right after, you tell Alexa to update you about the day. After all, you need to know about the weather to get ready. The first thing you do when you sit in your car to go to the office is to open up the online app, Google Maps, to know about the fastest route to work. When at your desk in your workplace, you use the internet not only to run online software but also to see what tasks you have been allocated and to upload those tasks when done. Internet is also used by you to exchange messages with other colleagues at the workplace and your dependents at home. As soon as you get off work, you use various online messaging apps to group message all your friends that you are free to party after a hard day at work. Once at the party, you go ahead and upload all your pictures with friends on social media using the internet. And late at night, you read online content just like you are doing right now.
Let us tell you one more thing. You, as an internet user, are not an anomaly at all. Reliable figures from dependable research companies say that there are no less than five billion internet users on the crust of this pale blue dot in the universe we all live on. You know what that means? It means that a person is much more likely to be an internet user than to not be one! In order to reinforce the significance of the internet to you, we are going to make you know about some other shocking figures. Right now, there are a minimum of 35 thousand million devices connected to the network of networks. For comparison’s sake, the total number of people who have pledged allegiance to the star-spangled flag is 330 million! The final figure we are going to tell you about is the number of internet service providers (ISPs) in the country – there are more than 7000 of them operating here! An ISP is a company that offers internet packages to people such as Xfinity internet deals.
Every time something plays as big a role as the internet does on the human race, it gets talked about a lot. The network of networks is no exception to this rule. Different people like to discuss different aspects of the internet. You may find a certain sector of the human populace talking about semantics and how internet-related terms like DSL relate to other internet-related terms like WiFi. A second sector of the population likes to have discourses on more practical aspects like internet speeds and the negative impact of social media. Then, there are people like us who like to talk about the history of the internet. If you are an internet history fan like us, it is time for you to get pumped up! The reason we say this is because we will be discussing the first website on the World Wide Web today.
The First Website
The first website was built by Sir Thomas Berners Lee, a British computer scientist who is also considered the father of the World Wide Web. Although he had started working on it by 1989 under the auspices of the ENQUIRE project, the first web page did not go live until two years later in 1991. The exact date was the 6th of August which some may very well celebrate as the birthday of the World Wide Web.
You may wonder what the first website was built for. It was built for the European Organization for Nuclear Research, more commonly known as CERN due to its French name – Conseil européen pour la recherche nucléaire. Wikipedia defines its function as the following:
“To provide the particle accelerators and other infrastructure needed for high-energy physics research.”
Notably, linking web pages using HTML code is not a big deal now but it was a great milestone back then.
Wrapping Up
We hope this article helped you get a better understanding of how the World Wide Web was founded.
