Really?
But this article on Wikipedia acknowledges the start of the World Wide Web as August 6, 1991 when Tim Berners-Lee, the CERN scientist who invented the Web (yup, not Al Gore) made it publicly available.* (*Well if by "public" you meant a very nerdy bunch of newsgroup geeks.)
I think what CNNMoney is commemorating is the initial concept of the Web from a proposal written by Berners-Lee in March 1989 in which he references ESQUIRE, a database and software project he had built in 1980, and described a more elaborate information management system.
Either way, it's fine with me. I'll celebrate the birth of the Web today.
BTW, this link is supposedly, according to the CERN site, the First Web Page and it's running on an origianl NeXT computer acting as a web server.
And this post incorporates one of the most core aspects of the WWW in several instances: hypertext.
The ability to "jump" to a referencing source or another site providing more information on the highlighted subject was, and still is, mindblowingly powerful. It's gotten so commonplace and expected today that if I read something like a traditional newsprint newspaper, I am painfully aware there are no hypertexts giving a more robust experience of the article I'm reading. No wonder print media is dead.
So Happy Birthday Web!
(Oh, and BTW, isn't it ironic that while I was writing this post my Internet crashed. LOL)
EDIT: I noticed after I posted this that the header graphic I selected to represent the WWW looks eerily similar to the raster graphics depiction of international missile volleys on the NORAD "Situation Room" wall monitors shown in the video on my previous post. So we traded imminent global thermonuclear war for global connectedness. Cool.
