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30 years ago today, the first website was published

Over the last 17 months, the internet has become one of the most important resources whether it be for work, socialising or venting your frustrations.

Today marks the 30th anniversary of the first website published to the World Wide Web.

The website in question was published by Sir Tim Berners-Lee (although he didn’t have the Sir prefix back then) from his NeXT computer on 6th August 1991 at the European Organization for Nuclear Research more widely known as CERN.

The website is still accessible today and it’s incredibly simplistic. That’s likely a good thing though as the website serves as a sort of guide for how to create websites, the tools one could use and other useful information.

In fact, you can view that website today, right here.

According to the Centre for Computing History, to prevent people at CERN from accidentally switching his PC off, Berners-Lee’s penned a note in red ink that read, “This machine is a server. DO NOT POWER IT DOWN!!”.

Today there are millions upon millions of websites, with approximately 4.66 billion people online as of January 2021 according to data compiled by TechJury. By 2025 we are expected to be generating as much as 463 exabytes of data everyday. For reference, one exabyte is 1 billion gigabytes.

Given that without the World Wide Web, we wouldn’t have a job, we’re taking a moment today to reflect on the power that the internet has given us all.

Being able to access humanity’s bulk of information, history, entertainment and more at the click of a button is rather incredible and considering how intrinsic the internet has become in 30 years, it’s really tough to comprehend it started with one website at CERN.

At the same time, the internet has illustrated just how unfair societies can be at times, evidenced by the fact that despite over 4 billion people having internet access, more than 3 billion do not.

We’re hopeful that over the next decade we can address some of the issues with the internet including access, discrimination, harassment and misinformation among the many other ills we encounter on a day to day basis.

Maybe we could also have a little bit less of everything all of the time, though that might just be us.

[Image – CC 0 Pixabay]

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