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Internaut Day Might Not Be the Web Anniversary You're Looking For (fortune.com)

Posted by msmash on from the ignorance-day dept.

David Meyer, reporting for Fortune: The web arguably went public before August 23, 1991. Social media users are enthusiastically celebrating "Internaut Day" on Tuesday. They're thanking Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of the World Wide Web, for first providing public access to it on this day in 1991, precisely a quarter of a century back. The only problem is that the supposed importance of Internaut Day doesn't seem to be supported by much evidence. Berners-Lee submitted his seminal proposal for a new information management system to CERN on March 12, 1989, a date which Berners-Lee celebrates as the birthday of the web. The building blocks were specified and written up by October 1990, and the first webpage went live in December that year. So when somebody celebrates the "Internaut Day" today, it really doesn't seem like the right occasion. The report adds: According to Wikipedia, that's when "new users could [first] access" the web -- and that's what a gazillion news stories on Tuesday are supposedly celebrating. But it doesn't square with what the Web Foundation and CERN say.

3 of 70 comments (clear)

  1. The first real breakthrough wasn't the web by BarbaraHudson · · Score: 3, Insightful

    The first real breakthrough that brought digital communications to the masses was the various Bulletin Board systems. What did people do with them? Looked for pr0n, buying and selling stuff, uploading and downloading software, pictures, etc., sending each other messages about what they were doing ... the medium (dial-up or tcp/ip) wasn't important from the people perspective.

    --
    "Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
  2. Yeah, so? by ilsaloving · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Considering that a large portion of the globe believe and celebrate the birth of a god on Dec 25th, despite the fact that there is no evidence at all that this truely happened, I think we can probably let this inaccuracy slide.

    At least we know the internet really did happen.

    1. Re:Yeah, so? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Insightful

      Actually there is next to no none biblical sources verifying nor attesting to the historicity of Jesus.

      The ones most commonly referenced either refer to Christians, not Christ himself, which no more supports the historicity of Jesus than does the fact that Norse people's mythology involved a god with a hammer. Nor does the bible support the historicity of Jesus anymore than the Vedas, the Sagas, nor other religious texts confirm the existence of deities, nor mythical creatures.

      The Testemonium Flavium is the most commonly sited extra-biblical reference but it is problematic and believed to be at least a partial interpolation of latter scholars as no first century copies of Josephus exist. The other Josephus reference suffers similarly.