On the 6th August 1991, the first website in the world went live. It was produced by Cern, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, to help demonstrate the potential of the World Wide Web.
During 1991 servers appeared in other institutions in Europe and in December 1991, the first server outside the continent was installed in the US at SLAC (Stanford Linear Accelerator Center). By November 1992, there were 26 servers in the world, and by October 1993 the figure had increased to over 200 known web servers.
In February 1993, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign released the first version of Mosaic, which was to make the Web available to people using PCs and Apple Macintoshes.
Within 20 years web use has grown with 30% of the world’s population now on-line.
“I’m sure that not even Tim Berners-Lee himself [the British physicist credited for the invention of the World Wide Web] could have predicted that in a mere 20 years, the use of the internet would have exploded so dramatically, with billions and billions of websites now accessible,” says Chris Winstanley, vice president, marketing, of BaseKit.
“Now, even as new tools become available to allow people to access the Internet in different ways, the website is the heart of the Internet,” he says.
“For businesses, having a website can be the difference between success and failure. Recent research showed that over 82% of small businesses now see that having a website is a good thing for their business and that 66% see the company website as more important than their physical presence.
“However, despite the billions of sites out there, there are still many companies around the world who still don’t have one of their own. At BaseKit, we help companies easily create, host and manage their own websites, and we’re seeing massive growth in the number of websites created from developing markets across Latin America.
“At just 20 years old, the website has come a long way. As Internet access begins to spread across developing countries, and new tools are created that make it even easier for individuals and companies to create their own sites, we believe that it has an incredibly bright future ahead of it, and will evolve to have uses we cannot even begin to imagine at this stage.” says Winstanley.
