Green Gaia
Veteran Member
http://www.uua.org/news/2006/060806_www15.html
By November 1992, there were 26 websites online; on April 30, 1993, CERN announced that the World Wide Web could be used for free by anyonethus making real Berners-Lee's original commitment to keep the web free and accessible to all. In June 1993, html (hypertext markup language) programming language, used to create web pages, was released. In October 1994, the Netscape web browser debuted; President Bill Clinton put whitehouse.gov on the web at the same time. By August 1995, there were nearly 19,000 web sites; that same month, Microsoft made Internet Explorer for Windows 95 available. The first multilingual search engine, Alta Vista, appeared in December 1995. On July 4, 1996, the first free email program, hotmail.com, was released.
By August of that year, the number of web sites had explodedmore than 342,000 were online, including UUA.org. UUA.org's early web information was offered in text form through gopher protocol, but the first archived visuals of the more mature UUA web site show a graphic of World Magazine (now UUWorld) and links to the UUA's staff, board of trustees, departments and affiliates, along with several web featuresa pastoral letter from UUA President John Buehrens articulating his hopes for the UUA for the coming years, and an article by Moderator Denise Davidoff on her participation in an interfaith breakfast at the White House.
The second half of 1998 saw the creation of google.com, launched in the garage of a private home in California; and the UUA's Office of Electronic Communication. By August 2000, nearly 20 million web sites were online, continuing the astonishing growth of technology merging with our daily lives. 2001 brought the first podcast (a clip of a Grateful Dead concert) and the founding of wikipedia. UUA.org had grown too, to thousands of pages, offering personal and congregational connection to the headquarters of our faith in the US and showing Unitarian Universalists what ministry on the internet could look like in the aftermath of the September 2001 attacks on the US.
By January 2004, amazon.com had achieved profitability for the first time. In August, google.com went public, with shares offered at $85 each (they now sell for more than $400 each). In November, the Mozilla Firefox browser was launched, and the staff of the UUA began a redesign project to re-imagine the UUA's now-huge (more than 15,000 page) website as a user-focused site.
The World Wide Web grew more in 2005 than during the entire dot.com boom, with 17 million new sites debuting in that year alone. By August 1, 2006, there were more than 96,615,362 websites world wide. 147 million American adults now use the internet (62% of them connect using broadband as opposed to dial-up); 12 million American adults keep blogs; and 37 percent of all internet users use instant messaging. And by the end of 2006, the UUA hopes to debut its newly redesigned website.
The Web is still in its adolescence, and developments change our ways of communicating at an ever-quickening pace. As UUA.org continues to develop its services and presentation, we take inspiration from Berners-Lee's words: "Hope in life comes from the interconnections among all the people in the world. We believe that if we all work for what we think individually is good, then we as a whole will achieve more power, more understanding, more harmony as we continue the journey."
This article developed with information from:
"It allows people to do what they want to do more efficiently. It allows people to exist in an information space which doesn't know geographical boundaries....But on the other hand, I see it as something on which the questions of what we as individuals and we collectively do, are still just as important and just as much as before, up to us."
Tim Berners-Lee
On August 6, 1991, Unitarian Universalist Tim Berners-Lee then working at CERN (Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire or European Council for Nuclear Research) in Switzerland, introduced his world wide web project with a message on an alt.hypertext news group. He said his project "aims to allow links to be made to any information anywhere" by using hypertexta way of linking between different documents. Berners-Lee made his files available so that people could begin to replicate his invention, and by December 12, scientist Paul Kunz had set up the first web server at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC), which became the first website in the United States. Tim Berners-Lee
By November 1992, there were 26 websites online; on April 30, 1993, CERN announced that the World Wide Web could be used for free by anyonethus making real Berners-Lee's original commitment to keep the web free and accessible to all. In June 1993, html (hypertext markup language) programming language, used to create web pages, was released. In October 1994, the Netscape web browser debuted; President Bill Clinton put whitehouse.gov on the web at the same time. By August 1995, there were nearly 19,000 web sites; that same month, Microsoft made Internet Explorer for Windows 95 available. The first multilingual search engine, Alta Vista, appeared in December 1995. On July 4, 1996, the first free email program, hotmail.com, was released.
By August of that year, the number of web sites had explodedmore than 342,000 were online, including UUA.org. UUA.org's early web information was offered in text form through gopher protocol, but the first archived visuals of the more mature UUA web site show a graphic of World Magazine (now UUWorld) and links to the UUA's staff, board of trustees, departments and affiliates, along with several web featuresa pastoral letter from UUA President John Buehrens articulating his hopes for the UUA for the coming years, and an article by Moderator Denise Davidoff on her participation in an interfaith breakfast at the White House.
The second half of 1998 saw the creation of google.com, launched in the garage of a private home in California; and the UUA's Office of Electronic Communication. By August 2000, nearly 20 million web sites were online, continuing the astonishing growth of technology merging with our daily lives. 2001 brought the first podcast (a clip of a Grateful Dead concert) and the founding of wikipedia. UUA.org had grown too, to thousands of pages, offering personal and congregational connection to the headquarters of our faith in the US and showing Unitarian Universalists what ministry on the internet could look like in the aftermath of the September 2001 attacks on the US.
By January 2004, amazon.com had achieved profitability for the first time. In August, google.com went public, with shares offered at $85 each (they now sell for more than $400 each). In November, the Mozilla Firefox browser was launched, and the staff of the UUA began a redesign project to re-imagine the UUA's now-huge (more than 15,000 page) website as a user-focused site.
The World Wide Web grew more in 2005 than during the entire dot.com boom, with 17 million new sites debuting in that year alone. By August 1, 2006, there were more than 96,615,362 websites world wide. 147 million American adults now use the internet (62% of them connect using broadband as opposed to dial-up); 12 million American adults keep blogs; and 37 percent of all internet users use instant messaging. And by the end of 2006, the UUA hopes to debut its newly redesigned website.
The Web is still in its adolescence, and developments change our ways of communicating at an ever-quickening pace. As UUA.org continues to develop its services and presentation, we take inspiration from Berners-Lee's words: "Hope in life comes from the interconnections among all the people in the world. We believe that if we all work for what we think individually is good, then we as a whole will achieve more power, more understanding, more harmony as we continue the journey."
This article developed with information from:
- "Fifteen Years of the Web"
- The Pew Internet and American Life Project's study "BloggersA Portrait of the Internet's new storytellers" and Pew Internet and American Life Project Surveys (January 2006, February-April 2006, November-December 2005, and February-April 2006).
- An Interview with Tim Berners-Lee
- Weaving the Web (1999) by Tim Berners-Lee with Mark Fischetti, Harper Collins, 2000
- "Where Does the World Wide Web Go From Here?"
