The World Wide Web was created in the span of just three months at the end of 1990.
In the final few months of 1990, 35-year Tim Berners-Lee and his colleague Robert Cailliau developed the world’s first web client (a browser/editor), created the HyperText Markup Language (HTML), wrote the first web server, and tied it all together with an Internet communication protocol called Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP). This led to the first web page at info.cern.ch, which was live by Christmas Day, 1990.
Over thirty years later, in 2021, we finally got to see some of the original source code for the World Wide Web. In June of this year, Berners-Lee put an NFT (non-fungible token) of nearly 10,000 lines of the code up for sale at Sothebys. The NFT also included a letter from Sir Tim and an animated video, but the source code was the main attraction. It eventually sold for $5.4 million at the end of June. The sale was controversial, although Berners-Lee compared the NFT to a signed poster and said that proceeds would go to initiatives he and his wife supported. Regardless of what you think of the auction, the NFT allowed us a peak at the Web’s original code and I’ll be including screenshots of it throughout this article.
Read More at Web Development History
Read the rest at Web Development History