On March 11, 1890, American engineer, inventor and science administrator Vannevar Bush was born. He is best known as as head of the U.S. Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD) during World War II, through which almost all wartime military research and development was carried out, including initiation of the Manhattan Project. In computer science we know Vannevar Bush as the father of the memex, an adjustable microfilm viewer with a structure analogous to that of the World Wide Web.
On November 13, 1990, one day after Tim Berners-Lee's and Robert Cailliau's publication of the concept of a world wide hypertext system [2], the first web page was published. Today, living without the World Wide Web, or simply the Web, has become almost impossible. Our daily live depends on news spread over the web and ecommerce hase become a convenient commodity. Nobody wants to live without it. Incredible, but only 20 years ago, most people lived in the stoneage compared to today's virtual online worlds.
In the heydays of the internet - when Google wasn’t the only search engine people used to seek information on the web - web surfers (I bet you haven’t heard that term in a while) had several options for finding what they needed on the net.
In March 1989, Tim Berners-Lee submitted a proposal for an information management system to his boss, Mike Sendall. ‘Vague, but exciting’, were the words that Sendall wrote on the proposal, allowing Berners-Lee to continue.
Es sollte ein Notbehelf werden, eine pragmatische Lösung für das Informationschaos im Kernforschungszentrum Cern: Ein junger Physiker entwarf 1989 ein digitales Informationsnetz. Nun wird das World Wide Web 20 Jahre alt.