Home/Residential, Technology/August 1 is World Wide Web Day!
Web browsing and many other online activities we take for granted today wouldn't have been possible without the invention of the World Wide Web.
It’s difficult to get one’s arms around just how impactful the arrival of “the internet” was for people all around the world. And it’s amazing to think how relatively young this technology is, considering its extraordinary role in changing how the world communicates.
We put “internet” in quotes because what many people think of as the internet actually refers to a few different things. Often, people confuse “Wi-Fi” with the internet, although Wi-Fi refers only to an internet connection being broadcast over radio waves.
Another term that gets mixed up with internet is “World Wide Web,” but really the World Wide Web (aka “The Web”) is a global information system that operates over the internet – much as email or Skype or Netflix do. What makes the Web so interesting and important is that it essentially made the internet a more user-friendly place where people could easily share ideas, photos, baby videos – you name it.
Since August 1 is World Wide Web Day, we thought we’d take note of some of the facts and history behind the Web.
The invention of the World Wide Web is credited to an English software engineer named Tim Berners-Lee. The son of parents who were among the very first computer scientists, Berners-Lee was working at CERN — a particle physics laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland in the 1980s —when he became frustrated by the fact that information on computers was hard to share. Plus, the information was often in different computer languages. There had to be a better way.
If all of that sound mostly like gobbledygook to you, that’s OK. The point is, it worked, and worked so well that by the time the mid 1990s rolled around, businesses started to get the point that they needed to be on the World Wide Web just to compete. Everyone else soon followed.
Adaptation to the Web was aided by the fact that CERN agreed to make the underlying code for the Web available without any royalty fees — essentially opening up the Web to anyone and everyone and fueling the rapid growth of the internet, the World Wide Web and just about anything else you can think of that requires an online connection.
Despite the seeming ubiquity of internet access, there are still billions of people around the world who don’t have a connection — reliable or otherwise. That need is what’s driven Viasat to advance the availability of internet over satellite. Where cables and terrestrial wireless can’t or won’t go, satellite will, and it’s increasingly clear that satellite will be the technology to take the Web to many of the places it couldn’t go before.
If you want to know more about the World Wide Web, check out the book “Weaving the Web” by Berners-Lee himself.