Internaut Day: 25 Years of the World Wide Web

Today is Internaut day, a day of celebrating 25 years of public access to the World Wide Web.

The term “Internaut” in “Internaut day” is a portmanteau of the words “Internet” and “astronaut”.

Thanks to Sir Tim Berners-Lee, we have the opportunity to celebrate Internaut day today.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee is the Web Inventor and Founding Director of the World Wide Web Foundation, he was also named as one of Time Magazine’s “100 Most Important people of the 20th Century”, not to mention that Berners-Lee is also a scientist and has absolutely transformed the world we live in today.

Without the Internet, we wouldn’t have the ability to communicate on such epic proportions that we do today, amongst other things.

How did the Internet come about?
Sir Tim Berners-Lee came up with the idea for the World Wide Web (WWW) in 1989 whilst he was working at CERN. The idea was originally developed to satisfy the need of communication between scientists in universities across the globe.

On the 23rd of August 1991, Berners-Lee opened up the Internet to be the amazing medium on which you are reading this article, making the Internet freely available to the public. Berners-Lee is now dedicated to enhancing and protecting the Web’s future (watch video above).

Sir Tim first proposed names for the idea that he had developed such as “Information Mesh”, “The Information Mine” and “Mine of Information”. Not quite as catchy as what we know and love today. Could you imagine saying to someone; “Look it up on the Information Mesh!”?

Berners-Lee was knighted for his work by Queen Elizabeth II in 2004. Another interesting fact about Berners-Lee, that probably doesn’t come as much of a surprise, he was the first person to upload an image to the Web in 1992. It was a picture of CERN’s house band “Les Horribles Cernettes”.

A year after the release of The World Wide Web, there were around 3,000 websites available for the general public to visit online, which is quite the leap away from the >1 Billion estimated websites in 2014. And, the first ever “website” was a page detailing the information about the World Wide Web project, which was first observed by Robert Cailliau, who was then coined as “the first surfer of the web”, which is quite the title to own.

In 1999, Darci DiNucci coined the term “Web 2.0”, which was later popularised in the year 2004 and the term “Web 2.0” is the reason we have user-generated content, better usability, user friendly and two way communications on the Web.

Happy Internaut Day! And thank you, Sir Tim Berners-Lee.

Source: D3 Blog