Twenty years ago, CERN published a statement that made the World Wide Web ('W3', or simply 'the web') technology available on a royalty free basis. By making the software required to run a web server freely available, along with a basic browser and a library of code, the web was allowed to flourish.
On April 30, 1993 there was one document that officially put the web into public domain (seen here on right). The implications of this document are ineffable.
"There is no sector of society that has not been transformed by the invention, in a physics laboratory, of the web", says Rolf Heuer, CERN Director-General. "From research to business and education, the web has been reshaping the way we communicate, work, innovate and live. The web is a powerful example of the way that basic research benefits humankind."
To illustrate just one example of how the web has changed the landscape of education, we can look to the BCNet Conference, currently taking place in Vancouver BC. This event is geared towards discovering how provincial institutions are collaborating and sharing IT services to improve efficiencies and reduce costs. Topics discussed at the conference, such as identity management, wireless device demands, and cloud management, were hardly imaginable just twenty years ago.
The web technology, invented in 1989 at CERN by Tim Berners-Lee, was originally conceived and developed to meet the demand for information sharing between physicists in universities and institutes around the world.
Other information retrieval systems that used the Internet - such as WAIS and Gopher - were available at the time, but the web's simplicity along with the fact that the technology was royalty free led to its rapid adoption and development.
The first website at CERN - and in the world - was dedicated to the World Wide Web project itself and was hosted on Berners-Lee's NeXT computer. The website described the basic features of the web; how to access other people's documents and how to set up your own server. To mark today's anniversary, CERN is starting a project to restore and preserve the digital assets that are associated with the birth of the web. To learn more about this project and the first website, visit http://info.cern.ch
BCNet is a not-for-profit, shared information technology services consortium led by its members, British Columbia's public, post-secondary institutions. Owned, governed and funded primarily by its members, BCNET facilitates a unique, collaborative inter-institutional environment—one based on common goals—to explore and evaluate shared IT solutions for mutual technology challenges. More about the BCNet Conference 2013 here.
Follow the BCNet 2013 Conference conversation on Twitter @BCNET2013
Taken from an InterActions Press Release
Photos courtesy of CERN PhotoLab
Prepared by Melissa Baluk, TRIUMF Communications Assistant