Today is a special day in tech history.
Tuesday, March 12th marks the 30th birthday of the World Wide Web.
Tim Berners-Lee, then a 33-year-old software engineer, handed in a proposal for an information management system. His boss replied with a note that read, “vague but exciting.”
It basically was the first draft of what would become the world wide web that we know today.
30 years later, the inventor of the web shared a warning about the “sources of dysfunction” the web faces and how “the fight for the web is one of the most important causes of our time.”
In an open letter published Tuesday, Berners-Lee wrote about the consequences of the rapidly growing technology-driven world that his invention has fueled.
The internet has stretched our imaginations and made the impossible, completely possible. Berners-Lee said this communication system has “given marginalized groups a voice,” but has also “created an opportunity for scammers, given a voice to those who spread hatred, and made all kinds of crime easier to commit.”
But Berners-Lee said he is also optimistic about the future of the web and that “it would be defeatist and unimaginative to assume that the web as we know it can’t be changed for the better in the next 30 [years].”
Google honored the web’s birthday with an animated doodle that had pixelated letters that were frequently seen on web pages many years ago.
