Happy WWW Launch Date!

Mathias Biilmann

Exactly 36 years ago today, Tim Berners Lee publicly announced the World Wide Web in a post on the alt.hypertext newsgroup.

Date: 6 Aug 91 14:56:20 GMT
References: <1991Aug2.115241@ardor.enet.dec.com>
Sender: news@cernvax.cern.ch
Lines: 52

In article <1991Aug2.115241@ardor.enet.dec.com> kannan@ardor.enet.dec.com (Nari Kannan) writes:
> 
>    Is anyone reading this newsgroup aware of research or development efforts in
> the
>    following areas:
> 
>     1. Hypertext links enabling retrieval from multiple heterogeneous sources of
> information?

The WorldWideWeb (WWW) project aims to allow links to be made to any information anywhere. The address format includes an access method (=namespace), and for most name spaces a hostname and some sort of path.

We have a prototype hypertext editor for the NeXT, and a browser for line mode terminals which runs on almost anything. These can access files either locally, NFS mounted, or via anonymous FTP. They can also go out using a simple protocol (HTTP) to a server which interprets some other data and returns equivalent hypertext files. For example, we have a server running on our mainframe (http://cernvm.cern.ch/FIND in WWW syntax) which makes all the CERN computer center documentation available. The HTTP protocol allows for a keyword search on an index, which generates a list of matching documents as another virtual hypertext document.

If you're interested in using the code, mail me. It's very prototype, but available by anonymous FTP from info.cern.ch. It's copyright CERN but free distribution and use is not normally a problem.

The NeXTstep editor can also browse news. If you are using it to read this, then click on this: <http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html> to find out more about the project. We haven't put the news access into the line mode browser yet.

We also have code for a hypertext server. You can use this to make files available (like anonymous FTP but faster because it only uses one connection). You can also hack it to take a hypertext address and generate a virtual hypertext document from any other data you have - database, live data etc. It's just a question of generating plain text or SGML (ugh! but standard) mark-up on the fly. The browsers then parse it on the fly.

The WWW project was started to allow high energy physicists to share data, news, and documentation. We are very interested in spreading the web to other areas, and having gateway servers for other data. Collaborators welcome! I'll post a short summary as a separate article.

Tim Berners-Lee				timbl@info.cern.ch
World Wide Web project			Tel: +41(22)767 3755
CERN					Fax: +41(22)767 7155
1211 Geneva 23, Switzerland 		(usual disclaimer)

The web has been the most incredible invention during my lifetime. This email truly marked a moment that changed the world, and I still remember the awe I felt myself the day I realized that I could buy a domain, ship some text to it, and then have the same level of online presence as any of the largest companies in the world. I was already bitten by the programming bug before that, but this truly opened up the online world in a way that came to define my life.

Today we’re in a similar moment of time, that started with the Chat GPT launch in Nov 22. AI is the only change I’ve lived through that promises to be at least as enormous as the emergence of the web and everything it brought with it.

Wired The Web is Dead

I started building Netlify at a moment in time where the web was under a lot of pressure. In 2010 Wired ran the famous “The Web is dead” headline, and when Chris and I were out fundraising for Netlify’s seed round in 2015, one of the common rejection reasons (we got a lot of rejections!) was “why the web? Isn’t everything mobile apps or social media now?”.

We started Netlify because we believed the web’s problems as a platform were solvable by simplifying publishing, securing and scaling web projects. This gave rise to the Jamstack, Netlify, and together with many other communities we played a key role in making the web relevant again.

Today in this new age of AI, the web could very well come under pressure, and there are plenty of worries of what happens with the transition from search to LLM answers, whether agents will disintermediate everything, content dying out from a lack of ad monetization, walled gardens emerging as the new winners.

I’m as bullish as ever on the web, though, and keen on making Netlify play the same role in simplifying publishing, securing and scaling web projects in a new era where every computer user can suddenly write web applications through agents and where we can drastically lower the barrier to entry for fully unlocking the true power of the web.

What we’re seeing right now all points to the web being more relevant than ever:

  1. At Netlify we’ve quadrupled the number of daily signups year over year. We’ll soon hit 8 million developers on our platform, building millions and millions of apps, stores, agents, and sites. This shows that more developers are coming online, more people coding, more people building.

  2. When building an app gets as fast as a prompt, the web is the only delivery mechanism that can really keep up. You don’t want to submit to an app store after your agent is done, you want to share a URL.

  3. People still want to know the source of truth, they still want links from their agents, they still want experiences they can share vs experiences unique to them. The URL is more important than ever. Domains are more important than ever.

Agents will help us build on the web and access the web, they will help us index, navigate and interact with the web, but we can make the web the platform with the best AX, and at Netlify building the best agent experience for any developer platform is our way of simplifying publishing, securing and scaling web projects for all the new software developers that are born in the agentic age.

Thanks Tim Berners Lee for this amazing launch 36 years ago!