14 DAY TRIAL // The web is turning 20 today. Even those that grew up before it even existed can't imagine a world with out it. Yet in 1991 it was pretty radical new approach, known only by a few scientists and computer geeks.
It exploded soon after it was created and continued to grow at an incredible rate, becoming what we know today as the World Wide Web, with things like Google, Facebook and Twitter, things that the folks seeing the first web page probably couldn't even imagine.
Even as it's incredibly different from what it looked like at first, the web is still very much in the early stages and no one can really know what it is going to look like even five years from now.
Tim Berners-Lee started thinking about a way of making information accessible via the internet in a much broader and easier fashion, through a technology open to all.
This idea turned into the WorldWideWeb and he built all of the tools necessary mostly in 1990, including the first web server and web browser.
Berners-Lee created WorldWideWeb, the name of the first browser which doubled as a web editor. He also created the first web pages which described the project itself.
He made the first public announcement on August 6, 1991, the same day that the first website went live, accessible to everyone. The web grew slowly in the first year, as more web servers started popping up.
The web really started taking off when the Mosaic graphical browser showed up, in 1993. It was the first web browser to display images on the same page as text.
The team behind Mosaic, led by Marc Andreessen, went on to create a browser you may have heard of, Netscape.
It's impossible to understate the importance of the web, it's affecting billions of people every day, in subtle yet impossible to ignore ways. It's here to stay too, though evolving all the time, so by its 30th birthday, it will probably be unrecognizable, again.