Over the past three decades, the internet has transformed the lives of billions of people. For most of us these days, it’s rare that we go more than a few hours without interacting with the world wide web in some way or another. Whether it’s work, social media, online shopping, or gaming, the internet has become ever-present in many facets of our lives.
Even so the internet today is barely unrecognizable from what it once was. We can trace our digital lives back to the late 1980s, where Tim Berners-Lee first created what is now known as “Web1”, or the early internet, which he envisioned as a kind of global communication system made up of interconnected computer systems.
The Birth of Web1
At the time, the early internet had few users, most of them being academics and governments. It wasn’t until 1991 that the internet as we know it today started clicking into gear when the first commercial organizations began using it to do business.
The masses were first introduced to the web in 1992 with the birth of HTML pages that could be accessed via early web browsers such as Netscape Navigator and Mosaic. This is where Web1 started, bringing with it the advent of hyperlinks between documents, allowing users to click on text within a page and navigate to another website somewhere else on the internet.
It was around this time that it became much easier for people to create their own websites and share them with others, helping to accelerate the internet’s growth.
