A Pivotal Year In History - 1990 Actually Changed the World Forever...

Generally considered the final year of the cold war era, 1990 was a pivotal year in history for a very different reason altogether.

• In January, the first McDonalds was opened in Moscow USSR, a sign of things to come.
• In February, Nelson Mandela was freed after 27 years in prison, marking the final gasps of Apartheid.
• In April, the space shuttle Discovery carried the Hubble Space Telescope into orbit and with it our imaginations.
• May saw the World Health Organisation remove homosexuality from its list of diseases and in that same month Microsoft released, the now very quaint, Windows 3.0.
• In October, East and West Germany were reunified with the "bringing down" of the wall.
• And at the end of 1990, a revolution took place that changed the world forever...

But let's step back a year earlier to 1989 when Tim Berners-Lee, a physicist at CERN, wrote a proposal for information management, suggesting information could be transferred easily using a protocol called hypertext. The following year he was joined in his efforts by Robert Cailliau, a systems engineer, who was soon the number one advocate of this style of interface.

The precursor to hypertext however, was actually proposed all the way back in 1945 by Vannevar Bush who published an article in "Atlantic Monthly". The article outlined a proposal for a photo-electrical-mechanical device called a Memex, which could make and follow links between documents on microfiche (anyone else remember surfing articles this way at the library?)

Similarly, the internet had been around for many years, however it wasn't easily accessible to home users and had mainly been used for transferring files using protocols such as FTP that did not lend themselves to "browsing" information visually. The idea therefore, was to connect this hypertext style interface with the Internet, thus creating one single information network (originally to help scientists share information at laboratories).

The concept of hypertext would enable users to visually browse text on web pages, using a "what you see is what you get" (WYSIWYG) interface, to move through information via links (pretty much as we do today). This meant you would not have to download entire files to access key points of information, that you could actually search for specific information and that you could control exactly where you wanted to go and what information you accessed.

With this in mind, Berners-Lee created a browser-editor so that the Web would become a creative space to share and edit information. After some rather dry (translate dry as boring) suggestions for names for this interface (and not a little debate), in May 1990 the collaborative effort settled on a name; it was the WorldWideWeb.

The first ever web page went live to the internet in late 1990. However, a website like a fax machine is not much use if there's just one. Berners-Lee's team needed to entice others to create web pages and share information in the same manner. The problem was that the NeXT computer systems were rather advanced for the times and therefore less sophisticated software was needed for distribution to the general public.

By spring of 1991, testing was underway on a universal line mode browser, which would be able to run on any computer or terminal. It was designed to work by typing simple commands. There was no graphics and no mouse, just plain text, but it allowed anyone with an Internet connection access to the information on the WorldWideWeb. It was officially released to a limited audience in March of 1991 on a "priam" vax, rs6000, sun4 (that will only mean something to the truly geekoid among us, and probably only the old ones at that!).

During 1991 web servers appeared in various institutions in Europe and in December 1991, the first server outside Europe was installed in the US at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center. By late November 1992, there were a total of 26 servers in the world, and by October 1993 there were already over 200 known web servers, giving us just the smallest glimpse at how incredibly successful the idea would end up being.

In February 1993, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications in Chicago released the first version of Mosaic (I actually remember using Mosaic which just shows my age and confirms I must be one of those geekoids), which was to make the Web available to people using PCs and Apple Macintoshes.

From there the concept of the internet really took off. Everyone with computer access was suddenly able to share and lookup almost any information instantly and to communicate from anywhere in the world. In the still rather short history of mankind, the internet (and web pages) have been one of those truly monumental advances that have changed the way we live.

Perhaps not dissimilar to the invention of the aircraft which allowed us to fly great distances, the internet has significantly reduced the size of the world we live in, shrinking the virtual distance between countries, organisations and people through instant communication and the sharing of ideas, information and our lives.

I believe we are still at the early stages of what could be termed "an online lifestyle" and would not be surprised if one day all shopping, education, banking, careers, communication and entertainment (including radio and television) are all conducted exclusively through the internet. Just a little scary to imagine, but then I suppose if you took an airplane back a few hundred years, people would be similarly scared of it's implications; not to mention the roaring angry noise coming from it's hungry metal belly.

Today there are more than 100 million websites online and according to "Internet World Stats" 2007 sees well over 1 billion people regularly on the internet .