Twenty years ago today, Tim Berners-Lee authored ‘Information Management: A proposal’, the paper which sparked the technology that was to become the World Wide Web that we know and love today. But Berners-Lee thinks what we have in place today is “just the tip of the iceberg.”

The Web has quite a few birthdays, all of which are celebrated in some form. Last April saw the Web celebrate its 15th birthday, from the day in which CERN put it into the public domain. And now we have the 20th birthday from the day in which Tim Berners-Lee put forward the idea which eventually evolved into the Web.

The story began in 1980 when CERN, now famous for the Large Hadron Collider, when scientists at the organization started using Unix, an e-mail system, C programming, and Usenet. By 1989, researchers were using a smuggled-in Next Cube workstation, made by none other than Steve Jobs and his computer company at the time.

The NextStep Unix operating system was then combined with Berners-Lee’s innovative idea of using simple version of HTML, HTTP server software, and a URL to create a new document access system. This is, in essence, what we now know as the We, although its come on a little since those early days.

To commemorate the anniversary, Berners-Lee spoke about the Web and where he sees it heading in the future. He told the BBC’s technology correspondent Rory Cellan Jones:

The Web is not all done, it’s just the tip of the iceberg… I’m convinced that the new changes are going to rock the world even more.

In developing countries it’s [mobile Web] going to be exciting because that is the only way that a lot of people will actually get to see the Internet at all.

It’s amazing to think that the Web has grown from such humble beginnings to become the technological marvel it is today. Many people’s lives would be very different if Tim Berners-Lee, Vint Cerf and the other innovators who created the Web hadn’t had such foresight all those years ago.

But at 20-years-old, the Web is still in its infancy, with much scope for bigger and better things to come. Looking at how colossal the changes have been over the last 20 years, I can only imagine what the Web will look like in 20 years time. If I’m still around, I’ll be sure to take a reflective look.

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Entry was posted on Friday, March 13th, 2009 at 11:55 pm under Internet, Opinion, Technology, Web2.0.

Read more entries by Dave Parrack.
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