World Wide Web Turns 18

August 3, 2008 > MAUI TODAY 2 Comments
NEW FEATURE: 2008 Election News (see Navigation Bar above)
Aloha    

Click for Kahului, Hawaii ForecastSisters  Day
Day 216 of 2008
150 days left in this year
HAWAIIAN WORD OF THE DAY — ‘Upena: Web
 PIDGIN WORD OF THE DAY — Sande: Sunday
HAWAIIAN PROVERB OF THE DAY —  “They are a keeper of bundles.”
 HAOLE SAYING OF THE DAY — “When you come to a fork in the road, take it.” (Yogi Berra)
WEB SURF SPOT OF THE WEEK — War Profiteers
WEB VIDEO OF THE WEEK — Tim Berners-Lee on the Semantic Web
NETCAST OF THE WEEK — TruthDig.com Podcast
 GOOD DEED SITE OF THE WEEK — End Slavery
Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau
August, 1990: The creation of what would become the World Wide Web was suggested this month in 1990 by Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau at CERN, the European Laboratory for Particle Physics in Switzerland. By October, they designed a prototype Web browser. They also introduced HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) and the URL (Universal Resource Locator).
x
Mosaic, the first graphical web browser, was designed and released in 1993 by Mark Andreessen while a student at the University of Illinois. Mosaic Communications Corporation was founded a year later by entrepenuer Jim Clark, who recruited Andreessen to build the first commercial browser, Netscape, released in 1994. It owned the market, until Microsoft Corporation unleashed the first browser wars by releasing Internet Explorer the following year.

Netscape’s market share decreased steadily from then on, and in January 1998 it started the open source Mozilla Project. By the end of 2006, the usage share of Netscape browsers had fallen from over 90% in the mid 1990s, to less than 1%. x

Firefox, Netscape’s progeny through the open-source project,  was first released in November, 2004. As of July 2008, Firefox had 19.23% of the recorded usage share of web browsers, making it the second-most popular browser in current use worldwide, after Internet Explorer.

Today, approximately a billion people surf the World Wide Web.

EVENTS ON THIS DAY — August 3rd
1492: Columbus sets sail from Palos, Spain, with the Nina, the Pinta and the Santa Maria, to find a passage to the “Indies” (Asia) for Spain.
1860: The American Canoe Association founded at Lake George NY
1882: Congress passes the first law restricting immigration
1923: Calvin Coolidge takes over the U.S. presidency after Warren Harding dies in office
1975: The Louisiana Superdome is dedicated
1993: The U.S. Senate votes 96-3 to confirm Supreme Court nominee Ruth Bader Ginsburg
1994: Stephen G. Breyer is sworn in as a Supreme Court justice in a private ceremony at Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist’s Vermont summer home
2004: The Statue of Liberty pedestal in NYC reopens for the first time since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
2007: A jury at Camp Pendleton, CA, sentences Marine Sgt. Lawrence G. Hutchins III to 15 years in prison for the murder of an Iraqi civilian during a fruitless search for an insurgent.
x
BORN ON THIS DAY — August 3rd
1900: Ernie Pyle, WW II correspondent
1900: John T Scopes, Tennessee teacher convicted for teaching evolution
1920: P.D. James, mystery writer
1924: Leon Uris, novelist
1926: Tony Bennett, singer
1940: Martin Sheen, actor
1941: Martha Stewart, cookbook author/actress
1950: John Landis, director
1953: Randy Scruggs, musician
1977: Tom Brady, NFL quarterback
1979: Evangeline Lilly, actress