First website’s 20th birthday today

It’s the birthday of the worldwide web today, the now indispensable virtual entity which we couldn’t live without (or we’d certainly struggle to).

Or more precisely, the first ever website went live twenty years ago, on August 6th 1991, published by none other than Sir Tim Berners-Lee, of course.

Sky News posted a link to the original alt.hypertext newsgroup where Berners-Lee first made the announcement of his creation.

The man himself explained, on this day two decades ago: “The WWW world consists of documents, and links. Indexes are special documents which, rather than being read, may be searched.”

“The result of such a search is another (“virtual”) document containing links to the documents found. A simple protocol (“HTTP”) is used to allow a browser program to request a keyword search by a remote information server.”

And did this thing ever catch on when it was opened up to the world at large – well, eventually. It still took a few years of gestation, naturally, but it’s difficult to imagine life without the web organising our surfing now.

At the time of its launch, most folks didn’t see the potential of the system, or couldn’t imagine how it would expand to the scope of contemporary times.

So where’s the web headed? Towards waters HTML5, of course, and towards mobile browsers too. With the spread of smartphones, the mobile web is becoming an increasingly well travelled path.

Both these – fancier websites and smartphone surfing – are going to cause a problem in one area, however: bandwidth. The fancy stuff will require more of it, and the increase in smartphones will similarly place a strain on network operators’ infrastructure.

In fact, you can already hear the creaking of the latter as smartphone popularity continues to explode. 4G is coming, but not until 2013 in the UK, so how we cope over the next year should be interesting…

In terms of fixed broadband, both Virgin and BT are underway rolling out 100Mbps services, and the government is throwing pots of next-gen funding at not-spot areas around the UK (with around a third of the money now allocated at the last count).