n the beginning there
was little more than
I blinking black and green
screens, manned – in
the main – by sci-fi
enthusiasts who reacted badly to the
sun. Now – 20 years after British
computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee
coined the phrase “world wide web” –
the web has become an accessible tool
used throughout the world. Those
giant screens have become sleek iPads
and the power that this medium has
wielded in its short lifetime has
completely transformed our world.
For a second just try and imagine
life without it. If you still had to book
your restaurant reservation through
the number listed in the Yellow Pages;
if the only way to find out what
Shakespeare’s first play was involved
a trip to the library; if you had to pick
up the phone and call your friend in
Australia not Facebook them. A glance
at the way our world has evolved over
the past two decades is enough to
convince anyone that truth is stranger
than science fiction. Because while
there may be little sign of Jetson
Hoverpods, the web has, inarguably,
reshaped commerce, connected the
far reaches of humanity and even
reworked millennia-old models of
human hierarchy.
For many of us our first
memories of the strange new
world of the internet began at
university or school when new-fangled
‘electronic mail’ became a convenient
tool for masquerading gossip with
friends as ‘work’. Since then it’s been
an exciting journey through music
piracy, Friends Reunited, Wikipedia,
MySingleFriend and WikiLeaks to
where we are now. But it actually
began long before that – back in the
Sixties in fact (it was created by a
modest and unsung engineer named
Paul Baran). “It was a defence against
nukes,” says Nick Black, who was a
cybernetics professor at the University
of California, Berkeley at the time and
later a dotcom entrepreneur. “By
designing a national computer system,
the communications system would not
fail if one or two computers were
knocked out by a bomb. So now we
have a system for the military that is
not dependent on a central mainframe
– which is a big deal.”
How it got from there to what we
have now is a complicated journey,
involving some of the most impressive
digital minds – self-titled ‘hackers’ – in
the world, all intent on creating a
medium which worked outside of
authority. If we were to go into the full
story now we’d be here for hours, but
in short here are the highlights: in 1969,
the Advanced Research Projects
Agency Network (Arpanet) created
various ‘host’ computers to join the
THE W EB’S IMPA CT
WHAT DID
WE DO
WITH OUR
TIME BEFORE
THE WEB?
The digital revolution that brought us Twitter, YouTube
and LolCats is 20 years old this week.
Stylist investigates how the web shaped our world
University of California to Stanford, a
concept which spread to France, then
England. In 1971 Ray Tomlinson, an
employee at BBN Technologies
devised electronic mail for Arpanet
and made the decision to use @ to
separate the name of the user and
the name of the computer. In 1977,
a PC modem was sold. Then in
1991, 20 years ago, the first webpage
was created…
THE�DIGITAL�AGE
Slowly web companies began to pop up
– some of which we still use today.
Launched in 1994 by Jeff Bezos, one of
the original stores, Amazon is now worth
$6.8 billion. It revolutionised how we
shop. Not only did it mean we could
spend without leaving our bed, it offered
the model for low-cost product and
reviewer-led shopping. “To the point,”
says Matt Gierhart, head of social media
at web research firm, OgilvyAction.com,
“that now if a particular product
anywhere lacks ratings we are
immediately suspicious.” Amazon has
since expanded from books to offer
everything from swingball sets to lingerie,
its popularity culminating in a day on
which 24 items were ordered a second.
It’s hard to believe a time without it,
but Google – the world’s most popular
search engine – didn’t actually launch
until 1998, created by Stanford
PhD students Larry Page and
WWW�STYLIST�CO�UK� X ��
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