Happy 25th birthday to the World Wide Web - CNET

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Internauts, today we celebrate this glorious technology that brings us all together! On August 23, 1991 -- 25 years ago today -- the public gained access for the first time to the World Wide Web, designed and deployed by computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee at CERN in Switzerland.

It gave rise to the internet as we know and use it today.

The internet and the World Wide Web are not interchangeable. The internet was first connected in 1969, and refers to the network that carries information between nodes. The World Wide Web refers to the space on this network where information, such as web pages and documents, are stored. Think of the World Wide Web as neurons, and the internet as synapses.

In 1980, Berner-Lee had created a personal database of people and software models at CERN. It was here he deployed the use of hypertext, where each page linked to another, already existing page. Over the next decade, he would develop this further, and in 1989 proposed the idea of "a universal linked information system" to help physicists collaborate, combining the internet with hypertext.

In 1990, he built the HyperText Transfer Protocol (which you may know as HTTP); the HyperText Markup Language (HTML); Uniform Resource Identifier (or URL); the first web browser and server; and the first web pages.