Monday, May 06, 2013

The Day Distance Disappeared


From Real Clear Politics:
Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Heart's Club Band lyrics notwithstanding, this week was the 20th anniversary of the birth of the World Wide Web. 
The Web was invented in Switzerland. At the CERN laboratory near Geneva. The acronym CERN originally stood in French for Conseil European pour la Recherche Nuclaire (European Council for Nuclear Research). The name has since changed, but the acronym has stuck. 

On April 30, 1993, CERN published a paper essentially giving the World Wide Web to the world. For free. 
Everything you do on your desktop, your laptop, your tablet, or your smartphone is only possible because that happened 20 years ago. 
The system had been designed by British physicist Tim Berners-Lee at CERN in 1989 to, according to the CERN webpage, "meet the demand for information sharing between physicists in universities and institutes around the world."

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