Twenty years ago, in a research establishment in the Swiss Alps, a British-born computer scientist dreamt up a new way for academics to share information around the globe.I can't believe the WWW is 20 years old.
Two decades on, there are over 200 million websites and over one trillion unique URLs. An astounding 1.6 billion people use the web worldwide, and...in the UK the figure stands at over 70 per cent of the population.
Sometime around late 1992 or early 1993 I innocently posted a question on an Ottawa Usenet group asking when we might see a graphical user interface (GUI) for this "Web" thing.
Well I was totally not prepared for the yelling match that broke out, nor the ad hominem attacks on my personal intelligence. What kind of moron asks that? Who needs a (expletive deleted) gooey? Only noobs need GUIs. The Internet on training wheels... gimme UNIX anyday... ad nauseam.
But as is often the case, I've noticed, as soon as I think stuff up, it happens. Not much later after this flaming by the "cogniscenti" Mosaic appeared. There it was. The GUI I asked for, the very first Web browser and the great-grand-daddy of the Firefox browser I'm writing this blog post with. But it was surprising how much animosity there was in those days to the notion of a graphical Web browser.
I guess to those heavily invested in UNIX, DOS and command line interfaces, the invasion of their private little text-only internet by the mouse clickers was horrifying.
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