Happy birthday, WWW

On March 12, 1989, computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee submitted a proposal for a new, hypertext-based information management system at CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research) to address the problem of long-term information loss due to employee turnover. His solution was a non-linear pool of information interconnected with hyperlinks. And hence the World Wide Web was born.

Today, 25 years later, of course the WWW has evolved into a repository of Justin Bieber, pr0n, pictures of cats with amusing captions, and blogs like this one. Occasionally, academic research does still get done.

The original WWW went "live" in 1991. Although it's changed locations, it's still viewable. As an HTML coder, I was eager to view the source just to see how different the original HTML markup was from the current 5th version.

The Web has come a long way in 25 years from those plain grey pages we all discovered back in the early 90s. Sites like Blogger or Facebook simply wouldn't have been possible with the technology of the time; it took about a decade for that. I need to leave a note for myself for March 12, 2039: how will we share our LOLcats then?