World Wide Web Day: A look back at the evolution of the internet

Today is World Wide Web Day. On this day back in 1991, the brilliant folks at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research CERN basically made their “World Wide Web” project available to the public. At that time, they had no idea about the force that were unleashing, which has come to reshape human society.

Mind you, today is not the internet’s birthday. That would be January 1, 1983 – the day the ARPANET and the Defense Data Network officially switched to the TCP/IP protocol. We’ll be focusing more on August 1, 1991, the day the internet went from a tool for scientists to a playground for all of us – and everything that’s happened to the World Wide Web ever since.

The primordial soup (1960s-70s)

Before the web, there was ARPANET. The US Defense Department started it in the 60s, spurred by the Cold War space race.

The idea was to let researchers share information without having to physically move giant computers or mail magnetic tapes. The 70s gave us network email, courtesy of Ray Tomlinson in ’72, and the term “internet” itself was coined a year later as networks started linking up internationally.

Laying the foundation (1980s)

The following decade was all about building the internet’s skeleton. While TCP/IP (the set of rules governing connection between computers) was developed during the 1970s, it became the standard only on January 1, 1983. Starting that day, different networks could finally intercommunicate, creating one giant interconnected network.

Not long after arrived the Domain Name System (DNS), saving us all from having to memorise numeric IP addresses. It gave us the familiar .com, .org, and .edu we use today. The first-ever domain, symbolics.com, was registered in 1985.

The internet really takes off (Early 1990s)

The 90s were when the internet really took off. Tim Berners-Lee developed HTML in 1990, the language used to build websites. Then CERN made the World Wide Web public in 1991. Things moved fast.

The first web browser for the masses, Mosaic, launched in ’93. Netscape followed in ’94. Commercial providers like America Online and Compuserve jumped in. By 1995, Amazon and eBay were live, and we even got the first viral video, a weird 3D animation called “The Dancing Baby,” in 1996.

The internet gold rush (Late 1990s)

The late 90s felt like a digital gold rush. The browser war between Microsoft and Netscape was in full swing. A little startup called Google launched its search engine in 1998, which would fundamentally change how we find information.

Then came Napster in 1999, introducing peer-to-peer file sharing and also giving the entire music industry a massive headache as the service contributed to massive copyright violations.

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The hype surrounding the internet eventually reached a fever pitch, leading to a rapid rise in technology stocks, particularly those related to the internet. Eventually, it led to the dot-com bubble bursting in 2000. It was a reality check for the industry as it proved that not every idea with a .com attached to it was a guaranteed winner.

The dawn of the social networks (2000s)

After the dot-com crash, the internet became less about just getting information and more about connecting with people. The era of social media dawned.

MySpace and WordPress kicked things off in 2003. Facebook arrived in 2004 and slowly took over the world. Then, YouTube gave us a platform for endless video in 2005. Twitter taught us to be concise in 2006. During this time, we all became creators, uploading, posting, and sharing bits of our lives.

The internet starts living in people’s pockets (2010s)

But it was the 2010s that put the entire internet in our hands. During this time, mobile browsing quickly became the main way we get online. The launch of photo-sharing giant Instagram in 2010 was a sign of things to come. The digital world became intensely visual and app-driven.

Voice assistants like Google’s arrived in 2016, letting us just talk to the internet. This decade also saw the rise of the Internet of Things (IoT) – by 2018, around seven billion devices from phones to fridges were connected.

The convenience brought about by the internet also came with a price, specifically surveillance, which whistleblowers like Snowden exposed and sparked a global debate about privacy.

The next frontier (2020s and beyond)

It’s 2025 as of writing and the internet is more embedded in our lives than ever. Over half the world’s population is online. 5G networks, first launched in 2019, have made our connections faster and more reliable. New speed records are broken every year.

But things are set to only get faster and more interconnected from here. The next big push is getting the rest of the planet online with projects like SpaceX’s Starlinks satellite constellation.