Happy 25th birthday, World Wide Web!
Did you know UNC-Chapel Hill’s Paul Jones, clinical professor at the School of Information and Library Science (SILS) and the School of Journalism, has a special connection to this month’s celebration?
Last year, Jones helped “find” the earliest known Web page created by British computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee, who first proposed in 1989 a browser-based, hypertext system that would eventually become the Web. The story goes something like this:
A broadcast of National Public Radio’s “All Things Considered” in May reported that the first known Web page was lost and the earliest known “official record” was a copy Berners-Lee saved in 1992.
When Jones learned of the report, he sent a tweet to CERN along with a link to his copy of the page that dated to 1991 – an even earlier version than the official 1992 record.
“Fact is that those pages — Tim Berners-Lee’s Demonstration Page for Hypertext 91 and my own personal page — have been on the net almost continually since they were developed and/or modified on my NeXT cube during Tim’s visit to UNC in the late fall of 1991 on his way to San Antonio and the ACM conference in December 1991,” Jones said last year.
Read the full story from UNC’s School of Information and Library Science.
Published March 12, 2014.