25 things you didn’t probably know about the World Wide Web

The World Wide Web turned 25-years-old this year. The Web, all due respect to Al Gore, was created by a man named Tim Berners-Lee. When he first thought of the idea his boss at time called it “vague but exciting”, and allowed Berners-Lee to develop his idea for a World Wide Web on the side.

But how much do you know about the World Wide Web? Did you know that the Web is not the same thing as the Internet? Here a few things you probably didn’t know about the World Wide Web straight from the World Wide Web inventor’s Web site:

1. The Web is not the same thing as the Internet. The Internet protocols describe how to send packets of information between pieces of software. The first Internet protocols were defined in 1969. Since then, many applications have used them in different ways, including Email, FTP, and the Web. The Web is any information that is identified with a URL (Universal Resource Locator). That makes the URL the most fundamental piece of Web technology.
2. The double slash “//” in URLs was an idea Berners-Lee copied from the Apollo workstation’s ‘domain’ file system. Microsoft later adopted double backslash ‘\\’ under the same influence.
3. Although many Web site addresses start with “www” there is no requirement they begin this way; it was just an early convention to help people recognize that someone was running a Web server.
4. Internet live stats estimates that the number of Web sites will reach 1 billion by the end of 2014, this anniversary year.
5. In 1990, Berners-Lee wrote the first browser and editor, called “WorldWideWeb.app,”  which ran on a NeXT computer. Steve Jobs had left Apple to create NeXT Inc., and later returned to Apple.

See all of  “25 things you didn’t probably know about the World Wide Web” here.