Launching a series of reports examining the impacts, trends and attitudes around public use of the Internet, the Pew Research Center is marking the 25th anniversary of the creation of the World Wide Web by Sir Tim Berners-Lee.
Lee wrote a paper on March 12, 1989 proposing an “information management” system that became the conceptual and architectural structure for the Web. He eventually released the code for his system—for free—to the world on Christmas Day in 1990. It became a milestone in easing the way for ordinary people to access documents and interact over a network of computers called the internet—a system that linked computers and that had been around for years. The Web became especially appealing after Web browsers were perfected in the early 1990s to facilitate graphical displays of pages on those linked computers.
The first report is The Web at 25. As Lee notes, we have built an amazing resource in a scant quarter of a century.