Post 4: Research on Worldwide Web

The World Wide Web was created on top of the Internet to allow for easier access to the information there. That information was available on documents accessible through Uniform Resource Locators (URLs). With the Web, all of these resources are connected with hypermedia (hyperlinks, hypermedia, etc.) that send users to other pages with related information. This design created an easy-to-understand user experience without people needing to learn a lot. With about 2 billion websites out there on the internet today, the World Wide Web is something that has been ingrained in our culture for decades. 

The 1980s were a time when information sharing primarily came from fax machines. The World Wide Web's inventor of the Web was a British scientist named Tim Berners-Lee. He was working at CERN in 1989 when he had the idea of it originally being a way for scientists in institutions and universities to share information on the internet. All of these ideas started with all of the computers at that institute not being able to communicate with each other. Lee would write all of the programs to help CERN become a center of data networks. Come 1989, he found a way to share information with the internet with hypertext. The World Wide Web used the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) that helped its servers connect with clients and it is still used today. What started as a predominantly European system would soon find its way to the United States.  It was put on public domain in 1993 and CERN released it with an open license. That decision helped it grow exponentially. Along with that, CERN would create a web browser called Mosaic. Most personal computers at the time were transitioning from their text-based roots and going into a more visual-based point-and-click control scheme. Mosaic would follow suit and even though more web browsers like Netscape Navigator, Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Google Chrome would become the go-tos; it set the standard. As the years went on, large companies would all have websites prepared to display information to represent them. The web would have millions of users by the end of the 1990s, marking its place in our technological culture all around the world. Even today, it is the way many of us communicate with others on the internet. 

Without the invention of the World Wide Web, this era we're in where information on everything is so easily accessible would not have started. Innovations like BookLinks' Internet Works implementing multiple tabs, Microsoft's Internet Explorer being built into their operating system, and Apple's Safari working on their mobile devices and having a private browser would bring us to where we are today. With every device on the market, there is an internet browser built off of the World Wide Web. With this much information available almost everywhere, our generation has become very dependent on it. It is arguable that it contributes to a possible addiction to technology. However, the good outweighs the bad. Having this much information is leading them to learn

a lot more out of school than previous generations. 

Links Used:

A Short History Video written by CERN: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sSqZ_hJu9zA

An Overview of its Origins: https://home.cern/science/computing/birth-web

Another Overview with more Technical Details: https://www.britannica.com/topic/World-Wide-Web