The World Wide Web is 15 years old today.
Or so some say.
Apparently some blogs are reporting that the web as we know it was officially born April 30th or May 1st, 1993, the date that CERN signed it into the public domain.
This is a little confusing. Didn’t we just celebrate its 10th birthday three years ago? According to CNN the date is December 15, 1995. Slashdot posted it as November 13, 1995. Wikipedia claims it was created in 1989.
Of course, if you want to argue the date when it went into the public domain, that is still in dispute. ComputerWeekly,com claims it was sometime in 1993, BBC timeline puts it at April 30th, 1993 and Wikipedia apparently confirms it.
While there is some argument as to its actual date of birth – it seems to hinge on whether one considers that date to be its conception, gestation, introduction to the world or final release to the wild – there is no doubt the father was Tim Berners-Lee.
So, what is the truth? I guess it depends largely who you ask. Inconveniently, nobody asked Al Gore.