Well, I guess the Google image captures it best – very understated.

Yes, the Web is 25 years old today – ah, it seems like it’s both been here forever and just a recent innovation.

I was actually on the internet before the WWW came along – I was using Delphi and (unknown to me) executing UNIX commands to do stuff: Veronica, Gopher, Finger and so on. UUencode/UUdecode.

But then Mosaic came along (what the hell is a winsock??), and – shortly thereafter – Netscape. Graphics. Hyperlinks. Magic.

The web has changed my life – I do web development for a living (an occupation that wasn’t one 25 years ago), and I live on the web in many ways: Write on this blog, post some of my pictures on my online gallery, by stuff via Amazon and other sites. The web has fundamentally changed so many lives; it’s hard to believe it was just begun 25 years ago.

Happy B-day WWW – and thanks, (Sir) Tim Berners-Lee!

Updates 3/13/2014:

• Tim Bray had one of the more interesting takes on the B-day. He’s always a good read. The one sentence that resonated: “The Web’s a container; it’s what it carries that matters.” That is so true – without the content, the APIs and the mashups, the web is just a protocol, and a pretty vanilla (but brilliantly clever) one at that.
• To be clear, 3/12 was the day Berners-Lee turned in his proposal for the web, not the day the first server (also by Berners-Lee) fired up. One could also count the release of Mosaic as the birth of the web. Whatever.