This week unofficially marks the 25th anniversary of the Internet. Officially the 6th August 2016 was when the first website was made public but the date of 23rd August has stuck in the minds of ‘internauts’ across the globe and has been disputed for many year. Anyway, we can safely say that August 1991 was the month the internet was made public! We’ll have a look at what’s changed on the internet over the years, looking at some of the biggest websites have evolved and how the internet as a whole has changed our lives forever.
The brief history behind when the internet started
Technically, the ‘internet’ (not to be confused with the world wide web) began in the 1960s when research was commissioned by the United States government to build a computer network. An ARPANET computer network in the 1980s was used for the academic and military institutions to communicate between each other at regional levels. It wasn’t until the 1990s when commercial networks were built which spawned the internet as we know it today.
The world wide web (WWW) was officially created in March of 1989. Then the first ever web page went live in 1990 but access to the internet only became public on 6th August 1991 (or 23rd August 1991 depending on who you believe!). The world wide web was the concept of Sir Timothy John Berners-Lee a British scientist at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research. April 1993 marked the month when the code which runs the web to be made royalty-free forever.
What did the first website look like?
Interesting question. In fact you can still visit it today by going to http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html and it was built by Sir Timothy John Berners-Lee himself. We’ve added a screenshot below if you don’t have the time. It was a straightforward text-based website explaining the meaning of the project of the World Wide Web.
Yahoo! – how the website has changed
Most of us when we first started using the internet relied on the search engine Yahoo! to provide us with results – before the popularity (and birth) of the beast that is Google. We thought we’d take a look at how it used to look (courtesy of the Wayback Machine) and how it looks today.
As you can see much has changed over the last 20 years of the website. Due to internet speeds being slow, images were used sparingly in the 1990s to cut down on loading times, therefore text figured prominently on most web pages in this era. You may feel it is quite amateurish to look at the websites you know and love at this time, but we have to remember that they were experiments in themselves, since no-one could know how popular the web would be today.
We all rely on the internet in some way, shape or form in the UK, but it’s important to note that even now some third-world countries and remote areas still have limited or even no internet access. Hopefully over the next 5-10 years this will change as the whole concept of the internet is that it should be public to all, wherever you are.
Is your website still stuck in a different era?
So if you feel like your website is stuck in the 1990s, or needs a new beginning design-wise, we’d be happy to help. Please get in contact with us and we can bring your website up to speed, getting your business ahead online.
