{"id":57993,"date":"2019-07-05T14:29:52","date_gmt":"2019-07-05T18:29:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/newsroom.carleton.ca\/?post_type=cu_story&p=57993"},"modified":"2025-10-15T10:20:33","modified_gmt":"2025-10-15T14:20:33","slug":"world-wide-web-turns-30","status":"publish","type":"cu_story","link":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/news\/story\/world-wide-web-turns-30\/","title":{"rendered":"Thirty Years of the Web"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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\n Thirty Years of the Web\n <\/h1>\n \n <\/header>\n <\/div>\n\n \n <\/path>\n <\/path>\n <\/svg>\n <\/div>\n\n \n\n <\/div>\n<\/section>\n\n

The World Wide Web unleashed a torrent of information unlike anything that preceded it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 1989, British physicist Sir Tim Berners-Lee proposed the idea as a way to help researchers at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN<\/a>) connect and share their findings. Thirty years later, his invention has connected more than 4.4 billion people around the world with a vast, ever-expanding archive of information.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The web ushered in an era of technological change that transformed nearly every aspect of our lives. It reinvented how we learn, choose a restaurant and find a date.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Thirty
Geology Prof. Tim Patterson<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Those changes didn\u2019t happen overnight. In the early days of the web at Carleton University, with the technology still in its infancy, it had a long way to go.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Geology Prof. Tim Patterson<\/a> was an early adopter. In 1996, he began giving students the option of contributing to an online museum instead of writing a term paper. At the time, the idea was considered innovative enough to merit an article in the New York Times<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When Patterson dreamed up the Hooper Virtual Natural History Museum<\/a> \u2014 which he named after former Carleton Earth Sciences Prof. Ken Hooper \u2014 the entire World Wide Web consisted of about 23,000 websites. There was no YouTube, no Facebook; even the New York Times hadn\u2019t launched its website yet.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Two and a half decades later, there are nearly two billion websites, including an archived version of the Hooper Museum. It\u2019s a simple site by today\u2019s standards, but at the time it was on the leading edge. The museum was even part of the Canadian Pavilion at the Internet World\u2019s Fair<\/a> in 1996, which Carleton led and hosted.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cBack then, there were none of the programs people use today,\u201d Patterson says.<\/p>\n\n\n

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\u201cDreamweaver and Squarespace have made it very easy to build a website with templates. For the Hooper Museum, students actually had to learn HTML and code.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

With so much effort put into development, web-based term projects typically didn\u2019t have as much detail as regular term papers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cBut our aim was to make it accessible for people in grade school or high school or the general public,\u201d says Patterson. \u201cStudents got excited because the web was still new then. They\u2019d say, \u2018Wow, there’s someone who will see this who is living in Australia.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n

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The Early Days of the Internet at Carleton<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

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In the early days of the web, the idea that someone halfway around the world could see your work was a powerful one. Connectivity was accelerating, but the ability to communicate instantly with people anywhere on Earth was still so novel that Carleton\u2019s early web users were not even phased by ploddingly slow connection speeds.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 1989, Carleton accessed the Internet, allowing researchers to better collaborate with their colleagues around the world. That connection transferred data at just 56 kilobytes per second. It was the highest speed available at the time but is far slower than even the slowest home connections today.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Thirty
John Stewart<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

\u201cYou’d think that it would have been too slow, but it was actually revolutionary compared to what we had before,\u201d says John Stewart, a computer systems and network administrator in the School of Mathematics and Statistics.<\/p>\n\n\n

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\u201cPreviously, Carleton\u2019s email used a \u2018store and forward\u2019-type service. If you were sending a message to someone in Australia, it would first go from our mainframe computer through a data line to a mainframe computer at the University of Ottawa, and then it might sit in a queue there waiting to get through the next connection to a computer at Queen’s, and then it might sit in the queue there before being transmitted to the University of Toronto and so on.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

It could take hours \u2014 even half a day \u2014 for an email message to get to Australia.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cBut when it became a direct connection, I can remember faculty members calling me to tell me they\u2019d sent a message to a colleague in Australia and got a reply 10 minutes later,\u201d says Stewart. \u201cIt really made the email service vastly more useful.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n

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Connecting to the Global Community<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

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In the earliest days of the web at Carleton, users were mostly scientists, mathematicians and engineers, but in 1992, Carleton played a role in taking the Internet beyond the university\u2019s walls.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Founded at Carleton, the National Capital Freenet<\/a> was Ottawa\u2019s first Internet service provider. A small bank of modems on the Carleton campus provided dial-up access to the public; 10,000 people signed up in the first year alone.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Commercial Internet would not be available for another four years and, for many Ottawa residents, the National Capital Freenet provided their first exposure to the Internet. The technology provided the basis for Carleton\u2019s first student portal, as well as for a web-based system for undergraduate physics tutorials and testing developed by Professor Emeritus Peter Watson<\/a>, then chair of the Department of Physics. This learning management system came long before the CU Learn of today.<\/p>\n\n\n

\"Thirty<\/figure>\n\n\n

The Web Goes Viral<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

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But for the web to truly go viral, it took more than just access.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Open source software made it easier to create content and applications. Web browsers made it easier to navigate the web. And eventually, cell phones allowed us to carry it with us in our pockets.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Thirty
Wade Hong<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Those who built the university\u2019s web capabilities could see the technology\u2019s promise early on, even the pieces of the puzzle that were not yet in place.<\/p>\n\n\n

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\u201cThe building blocks were there,\u201d says Wade Hong, an information technology officer for the Faculty of Science.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

\u201cAnd you had an opportunity to use them. Today, a lot of these building blocks are built for you. The Internet and web applications are already built, and they’re increasingly easy to use. Back then, people were trying to build the tools. It was a totally different experience, and it was a heady and exciting time to witness and participate in.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n

\"Thirty<\/figure>\n\n\n

—
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The World Wide Web unleashed a torrent of information unlike anything that preceded it. In 1989, British physicist Sir Tim Berners-Lee proposed the idea as a way to help researchers at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) connect and share their findings. Thirty years later, his invention has connected more than 4.4 billion people […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":410,"featured_media":57998,"template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"cu_story_type":[19],"cu_story_tag":[],"class_list":["post-57993","cu_story","type-cu_story","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","cu_story_type-technology-innovation"],"acf":{"cu_post_thumbnail":"blueprint"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/cu_story\/57993","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/cu_story"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/cu_story"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/410"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/cu_story\/57993\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":97211,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/cu_story\/57993\/revisions\/97211"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/57998"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=57993"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"cu_story_type","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/cu_story_type?post=57993"},{"taxonomy":"cu_story_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/cu_story_tag?post=57993"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}