Celebrating the most significant moments in website history

Tim Berners-Lee published the first ever website on 6 August 1991 - we look back at some of the key milestones of the past 20 years that have helped to make the web such a ubiquitous part of everyday life.

1989: The web is born

Tim Berners-Lee's original proposal at Cern in March 1989. This became the foundation for the World Wide Web.

Berners-Lee noted: 'what is required is a gateway program which will map an existing structure onto the hypertext model, and allow limited (perhaps read-only) access to it. This takes the form of a hypertext server written to provide existing information in a form matching the standard interface. One would not imagine the server actually generating a hypertext database from and existing one: rather, it would generate a hypertext view of an existing database'.

1992: From Cern to Mosaic

The work from Cern was picked up in 1992 by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications where two students, Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina, created Mosaic, the world's first popular web browser.

1994: Bill Gates launches Windows 95

Microsoft didn't really acknowledge the web at first. The company pushed its own MSN walled garden service. But Windows grew in popularity, opening up personal computing to the masses.

1995: James Gosling launched Java

In 1995 a team at Sun MicroSystems, headed by James Gosling, Sun Fellow and Chief Technology Officer, launched Java, a write-once, run anywhere portable programming language for the web. Java has allowed websites to include software, animation, games even adverts, that run when the user visit the site.

1995: Microsoft pre-installs Internet Explorer on Windows

Microsoft wanted people to use Internet Explorer and pre-installed IE on Windows desktops, which made the company unpopular with the US Department of Justice anti-trust division. Microsoft lost, but by then it was too late, and everyone had switched to IE.

1995: eBay launched under the name AuctionWeb

eBay was founded as AuctionWeb in California, on September 3, 1995, by French-born Iranian computer programmer Pierre Omidyar as part of a larger personal site. One of the first items sold on eBay was a broken laser pointer for $14.83. Astonished, Omidyar contacted the winning bidder to ask if he understood that the laser pointer was broken. In his responding email, the buyer explained: "I'm a collector of broken laser pointers."

The company officially changed the name of its service from AuctionWeb to eBay in September 1997. Originally, the site belonged to Echo Bay Technology Group, Omidyar's consulting firm. Omidyar had tried to register the domain name echobay.com, but found it already taken by the Echo Bay Mines, a gold mining company, so he shortened it to his second choice, eBay.com.

1995: Amazon aka Cadabra revolutionises ecommerce

Jeff Bezos founded Amazon.com, Inc. in 1994 and the site went online in 1995. The company was originally named Cadabra, Inc., but the name was changed when it was discovered that people sometimes heard the name as "Cadaver".

Amazon.com started as an online bookstore, but soon diversified, selling DVDs, CDs, MP3 downloads, computer software, video games, electronics, apparel, furniture, food, and toys.

Amazon has established separate websites in Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Italy, Austria, Japan, and China.

Amazon is currently the biggest ecommerce in world almost doubling the size of Staples, the second biggest ecommerce website in the world.

Aside form trailblazing online retail, Amazon is also one of the leading providers of cloud computing and is the leading ebook reader manufacturer with the Amazon Kindle.

1998: Google changes search and our lives

1999: Napster launches first music sharing site

2004: The Facebook is born

As of July 2011, Facebook has more than 750 million active users. Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg with his college roommates and fellow computer science students Eduardo Saverin, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes.

The website's membership was initially limited by the founders to Harvard students, but was expanded to other colleges in the Boston area, the Ivy League, and Stanford University.

It gradually added support for students at various other universities before opening to high school students, and, finally, to anyone aged 13 and over, but based on ConsumersReports.org on May 2011, there are 7.5 million children under 13 with accounts, violating the site's terms.

2006: Twitter launched as an SMS service

Twitter was created in March 2006 by Jack Dorsey and launched in July of that year. Twitter rapidly gained worldwide popularity, with 200 million users as of 2011, generating over 200 million tweets and handling over 1.6 billion search queries per day.

Twitter's origins lie in a "daylong brainstorming session" held by board members of the podcasting company Odeo. Dorsey introduced the idea of an individual using an SMS service to communicate with a small group.

The original project code name for the service was twttr, inspired by Flickr and the five-character length of American SMS short codes. 

Work on the project started on March 21, 2006, when Dorsey published the first Twitter message "just setting up my twttr".

"...we came across the word 'twitter', and it was just perfect. The definition was 'a short burst of inconsequential information,' and 'chirps from birds'. And that's exactly what the product was." – Jack Dorsey

2006: Cloud Computing

In August 2006 Eric Schmidt of Google described their approach to SaaS as cloud computing at a search engine conference. Later that year, Amazon included the word “cloud” in EC2 when it was launched a few weeks later (August 24), the term became mainstream. Difficult to define, Cloud Computing became known as SaaS apps and infrastructure, Google, and S3/EC2 services, Amazon.

Cloud computing is a general term for anything that involves delivering hosted services over the Internet. These services are broadly divided into three categories: Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). The name cloud computing was inspired by the cloud symbol that's often used to represent the Internet in flowcharts and diagrams.

Within the next few years we will see all of our media being stored in the cloud as well as endless possibilities. Watch this space.