WWW stands for World Wide Web, commonly called “web”, i.e. a public hypertext system that works on Internet, allowing consultation by using a browser (Navigator) – Internet Explorer, Opera, Mozilla Firefox, etc. in order to access website pages.
World Wide Web (WWW) was created in 1990 by Tim Berners-Lee, English engineer at CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research), whose headquarters are on the French-Swiss border. In 2004, he became Sir Timothy John Berners-Lee for this achievement being knighted by Queen Elizabeth II. In 1989, says Tim Berners-Lee, CERN was connected to an internal network and the ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network), decentralized network of computers created based on an American project, which provided “telnet”, file transfer (FTP ) and Remote printing (printing at distance). Then he had a brilliant idea to put together hypertext, TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) and DNS (Domain Name System). So the World Wide Web appeared. Since 1990, he is the one who developed the three main web technologies:
Web Addresses;
Hyper Text Transfer Protocol (HTTP);
Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML);
On the 30th of April 1993, CERN announced that the World Wide Web (www) will be open to everyone. The first Internet address of the Web server was http://info.cern.ch.
Having created World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee developed a Web browser and a Web editor, because he intended to make www a collaborative environment in which people could create information. However, www turned quickly towards the dissemination of information, rather than towards being collaborative.
In 1994, Tim Berners-Lee left CERN for MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) and, in the same year, he set up World Wide Web Consortium, which includes various companies dealing with web quality improvement.
Also in 1994, Yahoo was created – web directory – by a group of students at Stanford University, which became in a short time the largest catalog of web resources. In 1995, they created the yahoo.com domain.
In December 1995, AltaVista (in Spanish, “top view”) was the largest search engine World Wide Web, but Google has had supremacy since 1998.
In January 2012, one could find 580 million sites on the internet, of which 175 million were considered assets. The biggest jump occurred between 2005-2006, when many blogs were set up, personal pages and sites for large and small companies.
The web is, however, only one of the Internet applications, others being the e-mail, chat, Usenet (the forums). The Web was invented several years before the Internet, but the latter is the one that has enjoyed great popularity.
‘Hidden’ meaning of www?
Those concerned with esoteric and some forumists associated www with the fatal number 666, due to the fact that in Hebrew, each letter of the alphabet has a corresponding number and “W / V” (wav / vav) has the value “6″. According to other connections in ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Exchange), the letter W corresponds to number 87, i.e. 8 +7 = 15 = 1 +5 = 6. Some have gone further and deciphered various parts of Revelation in relation to the technological conquest (associated to Satan), “through its maneuvers (manipulations), he is controlling the big and small ones, the rich and poor, the free and the slaves, by the right hand (mouse), head, look, hearing (audio-video technology) and no one could buy or sell (credit card) without the sign of the devil or the number of his name (IP address). Others say that, like in other domains, God and the Devil go one by one to straighten or break, as appropriate, what the other did; so in the World Wide Web, www may be 666, but one can reconcile this by making the sign of the cross when typing the letters. Quite original compromise between technology and the threat of Antichrist!
