The Web - History & Evolution

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Arjit Sharma
01 Min

The internet and the World Wide Web have transformed how we communicate, work, and access information.

The Birth of the Internet

  • 1960s : U.S. Department of Defense funded ARPANET, which devised a revolutionary method of breaking a message into packets and send independently across network called packet switching (unlike circuit switching which used to take the whole line - early telephone calls)
  • 1974 : TCP/IP Protocol was developed, allowing different computers to communicate reliably.
  • 1983 : ARPANET adopted TCP/IP, and this became the foundation for the modern internet.

World Wide Web

In 1989, Tim Berners-Lee, a scientist at CERN, invented the World Wide Web (WWW) to make information sharing easier.

His vision was a system where documents could be linked via hypertext (clickable connections between pages) using HTML (HyperText Markup Language). What made this possible was HTTP (HyperText Transfer Protocol), a standardized protocol for requesting and delivering web content.

  • 1991 : The first website went live at CERN, explaining the WWW project.
  • 1993 : The Mosaic browser, with its graphical interface, made the web intuitive for non-technical users, sparking widespread adoption.
  • 1995 : JavaScript introduced dynamic behavior, allowing interactivity like form validation or animations directly in the browser.
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