Homeschool Connections

Check out Scientific American’s spotlight on Tim Berners-Lee.  A proposal he wrote twenty years ago became the blueprint for the World Wide Web.  The celebration took place earlier this month.

Read here to find out more:

•    Facts about the Web’s Creation

Read a few interesting facts about the Web’s early days.  “Information Mesh” was one of the early names suggested for the Web.  Another option was “The Information Mine,” of which the author, Mark Fischetti, shares that “Berners-Lee thought the acronym, TIM, was too egocentric!”

•    The Mind Behind the Web

I enjoyed reading about Tim Berners-Lee and his vision for the Web.  It’s amazing that it has come so far, so quickly.  It reminded me of my first experiences exploring the Internet.  Back then the service I had charged by the minute.  I would sign on, hurriedly gather information (as much as was possible with dial-up), and quickly sign out, in hopes that the bill didn’t get too high.

Here’s an excerpt from the article:

“By 1990 Berners-Lee had a fully formed vision: “Suppose all the information stored on computers everywhere were linked,” he thought. “All the bits of information in every computer at CERN, and on the planet, would be available to me and to anyone else. There would be a single, global information space,” a natural resource like air and water. The task left to him was to marry hypertext and the Internet.”

•    Remembering the Day the World Wide Web Was Born

In this article, Mark Fischetti writes about the early days of the Web:

“Berners-Lee accessed the first Web page, on the first Web server, using the first Web browser on Christmas Day 1990. Why did it take until 1993 before the public became aware of the creation?”

“Once Tim and Robert Cailliau established that the Web worked, they wanted to spread the word. After getting CERN to buy in, Tim spent 1991 flying around the world meeting with people who were interested in hypertext and the Internet and linking to create Web browsers to access what was a growing repository of information on Tim’s CERN computer. He also encouraged enthusiasts to start their own servers. From there, listservs helped spread the word; so did university computer science programs, which saw the coding of browsers and servers as a great way to get students to experiment. (One of the best known of these projects was headed by the University of Illinois’s Marc Andersen, who would later transform his creation into the Netscape Web browser.)”

“Tim began to get concerned, though, about universities and companies like Microsoft creating their own networks that might compete with the Web, or charging for content, which would violate his core principle: that everyone should be able to communicate freely with everyone else. To stop this from happening, he got management at CERN to release all of his source code under a general license so that any programmer anywhere could use it for free. He thought that if the whole world was building the Web together, no one company could take control of it.”

What do you remember about the early days of navigating the world wide web?

Here’s a great video to share with your kids when explaining how the World Wide Web works.