The World Wide Web is 30 years old։ How has the internet changed over the years?

In April 1993, there were only 623 websites on the World Wide Web (WWW), and few had access to them. Today, the number of these websites reaches more than 1.1 billion, and the number of users already exceeds 5 billion. Of course, in 30 years, not only the number of websites on the internet has changed.

A little history: How did it all start?

According to The Times, in the late 1980s, the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) needed technology that would allow thousands of scientists from hundreds of countries to quickly exchange information.

Programmer Tim Berners-Lee was working on an internal network for CERN at the time. In 1989, he proposed a blueprint for a global hypertext system that would be accessible from anywhere. It was this project that became the basis of today's internet, and its creators were Berners-Lee and his partner Robert Kayo.

Already in January 1991, the technology developed by the aforementioned specialists went beyond CERN and became available to other research institutes, and on August 23, 1991, to the general public.

Over the next two years, 50 websites appeared on the internet.

Browsers and internet penetration

In 1993, CERN made the WWW code and protocol free for use, which facilitated its wider penetration.

In the same year, NCSA released the Mosaic browser. This was a graphical browser that could display embedded images and submit forms that were processed by an HTTPd server. The appearance of this browser further increased the popularity of the World Wide Web, and in less than a year there were already thousands of websites.

The following year, Marc Andreessen and Jim Clark founded Netscape and released the Navigator browser, and with it came the Java and JavaScript programming languages. Netscape quickly became the dominant browser. In 1995, Netscape became a public company, causing a stir on the internet and starting the dot-com bubble.

Soon Microsoft developed its own Internet Explorer browser, which led to the start of the so-called browser war. Internet Explorer was the dominant browser for the next 14 years, helped by the fact that the browser was bundled with Windows.

1.1  billion websites

There are more than 1.1 billion websites on the internet today, but not all of them are active - only about 200 million.

In the 90s, most websites consisted of text and static images because the internet was quite slow. As recently as 1993, users could search for information about films and actors on a fan site hosted on the servers of Cardiff University's Faculty of Computer Science. This site later became known as IMDb, and is still called that way today.

Five years later, users were able to search for books and read reviews on the Amazon page.

In 1998, the Google search engine appeared. At the end of the year, there were already about 60 million pages in its index. To this day, the site, which was created as a research project by two students, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, remains the most popular search engine in the world.

As websites grew in popularity, so did e-mail.

In the early 2000s, the first social networks appeared and users began to gradually transform from content consumers to content creators.

This period is considered the transition from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0. It started in 2004 and continues to this day.

If you compare the most visited websites in 1993 and 2023, you can see a noticeable difference. Social media dominates among the most visited websites.

64% of the world's population has access to the internet  

In the early 2000s, about 44% of North Americans used the Internet. It is only in the last two decades that the web has become truly global, with the percentage of users increasing significantly in all regions. Today, 64% of the world's inhabitants, about 5.16 billion people, use the internet.

According to Datareportal, as of the beginning of 2023, there are about 2.18 million internet users in Armenia, which is about 78.6 percent of the population.