22 August 18

Happy Birthday, public World Wide Web! On 23 August (tomorrow) 1991, (Sir) Tim Berners-Lee released the first "browser" for the World Wide Web. This was a program that allowed users to retrieve files over the newly expanding "Internet," using links called Uniform Resource Locators. At first, users had to know which URL would give them the starting point for their "surfing," but soon there were search tools like "Archie" and then "Veronica" to help us find Web sites more efficiently. The first graphical browser (displaying images and decorated pages) came out in 1993. My tie shows mice chasing cheese on an old, clunky desktop monitor, similar to the standard personal computers of the early 1990s.