World Wide Web's 30th birthday

Thirty years ago today, March 12, 33-year-old software engineer Tim Berners-Lee submitted a proposal
to his boss that would set the technology world on fire and usher in the information age.

Berners-Lee was working at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) outside of Geneva,
Switzerland, in 1989 when he submitted Information Management: A proposal. It was a proposal to
better manage and monitor the flow of research at the labs, but within its pages were the underpinnings
for what would become known as the World Wide Web.

Google, which was made possible by Berners-Lee's invention, on Tuesday marked the technology
milestone with an animated Doodle featuring pixilated letters reminiscent of the crude, block graphics
that were common on early web pages. The image of a globe slowly renders on the desktop computer's
monitor as a reminder of the slow download speeds that hobbled our experiences in pre-broadband
days

The whole thing began when Berners-Lee grew frustrated that CERN was losing track of valuable project
information because of personnel turnover and incompatible computers people brought with them to
the office.

"When two years is a typical length of stay, information is constantly being lost," he wrote. "The
introduction of the new people demands a fair amount of their time and that of others before they have
any idea of what goes on.

"The technical details of past projects are sometimes lost forever, or only recovered after a detective
investigation in an emergency. Often, the information has been recorded, it just cannot be found."

Berners-Lee's proposal contained the basic concepts of the web, including ideas like HTML, URL, and
HTTP, but it would be another couple of years before he could demonstrate his idea. It would be
another couple of years until Jim Clark and Marc Andreessen popularized the notion of commercial web
browsing with Netscape in the mid-1990s.

In his annual letter on the web's birthday, Berners-Lee on Monday expressed optimism about what can
be achieved in the next thirty years.

"Given how much the web has changed in the past 30 years, it would be defeatist and unimaginative to
assume that the web as we know it can't be changed for the better in the next 30," he said.

There are nearly 2 billion websites today; as a platform for socializing, shopping, gaming or watching
videos online, it's hard to imagine getting along with out it.

Happy birthday, web!