Truly informative piece about history of web by Hiawatha Bray in today's Boston Globe, "Woven deep into our lives." Must read:
It was a technical paper with the simple title "Information Management: A Proposal," written by a researcher at a European physics laboratory and filled with esoteric terms like hypertext and browser.
It was also the birth certificate of the World Wide Web, a technology that's generated immense new wealth and transformed the ways we work, learn, and amuse ourselves.
Twenty years ago this month, Tim Berners-Lee, then a researcher at Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire, or CERN, in Switzerland, handed in his proposal for a new kind of computer network. That paper and the technology it envisioned would spawn such giant enterprises as Google, Facebook, MySpace, Yahoo, Amazon, and eBay. At the same time, the Web "has replaced countless other services and resources," said Ted Schadler, an Internet analyst at Forrester Research in Cambridge. Newspaper circulation dwindled as readers turned to the Web instead; travel agents shut down as tourists book their trips online. And millions of us started to watch our favorite shows on computers instead of TV sets...
