20 years ago: The web’s Big Bang

Twenty years ago today, Tim Berners-Lee wrote his original proposal for a better kind of linked information system. He was doing consulting for CERN in Switzerland, and found that its communication infrastructure was leading to information loss. So he proposed a solution using something called Hypertext. This led to the Hypertext Markup Language, or, as it’s more commonly known now, HTML. That in turn, led to the World Wide Web.

Berners-Lee openly admits he had no idea that his idea would explode the way it has. The Internet existed before the World Wide Web, but it wasn’t very user friendly, the web made it accessible to everyone. CNET’s Charles Cooper has more on the history. And below find a talk Berners-Lee gave at the TED conference earlier this year about the creation of the web, and where he thinks it’s heading next.