The world wide web hits its 20th birthday

13 March 2009 15:45 GMT / By Verity Burns

Twenty years ago today on 13 March 1989, a British scientist presented a research paper at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research that would change all of our lives forever.

That paper, "Information Management: A Proposal", was written by Sir Tim Berners-Lee, and described what we now know as the world wide web - albeit in a much more basic form than we have today.

Although the Internet did exist in 1989, it was limited to only defence and academic domains and was wholly text-based.

It was actually Sir Berners-Lee's document that resulted in the creation of Hyper Text Markup Language, better known as HTML, which would later allow images and texts to be presented in web format for the first time.

This, combined with Hyper Text Transfer Protocol (HTTP) and Uniform Resource Locator (URL) made for a framework that allowed electronic documents to be shared in an electronic format.

To mark its 20th anniversary, Sir Tim Berners-Lee will be making a keynote speech at the very same place he presented his paper 20 years ago, alongside a demonstration of the first ever web browser.

From dial-up internet and egg timers to broadband, wireless and YouTube - we've certainly come some way in the past 20 years. What do you think the next 20 has in store for us?

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Software, Websites, Online