Happy 25th birthday, World Wide Web

Hard to believe it's been this long, but 25 years ago today, on March 12, 1989, Tim Berners-Lee, a then-unknown computer scientist working at CERN, the European nuclear science organization, first published a paper that outlined how the World Wide Web would work. Before then, hyperlinks, HTML and even the term "web" meant nothing to anyone. Today, it's how we live our lives.

Interestingly, for many of us, this was also the very beginning of the Internet as we know it today. And by the mid-1990s, many of us were taking our first tentative steps online.

We often mistakenly think this is when the Internet started, but that's a bit of a misconception. The Internet was around in various forms since the 1960s. The Web was not, is not, and will never be the same same as the Internet. Rather, it is a service that sits on top of the Internet (like Gopher, WAIS, and even Archie, Veronica, and Jughead) and it's the one that transformed the Internet from a land of researchers, scientists, military personnel and geeks into the thing we all use today.

Here are a few notable resources if you want to dig a bit:

• Sir Tim's original proposal
• On the 25th anniversary of the web, let’s keep it free and open (Sir Tim's Google Blog post)
• WebAt25.org
• The Web at 25 in the U.S. (a Pew Research Center paper marking this milestone)
• The first-ever web page: - site, story
• 25 web milestones

Your turn: Although I'm sure the WWW doesn't look a day over 21, I'd be interested in your thoughts. How did "the web" begin for you?