Chances are you're pretty familiar with this new-fangled thing they call the World Wide Web.  I mean, you're obviously using it right this very moment.  What you may not know however is that yesterday, August 6th, was the 15th birthday for the technological wonder that has transformed business, education, entertainment and communication on a global scale.

Tim Berners-Lee, then a researcher at CERN, posted to the alt.hypertext newsgroup saying that his fledgling hypertext project was ready for public review.  While the original goal of the web was somewhat different than what it grew into (think back to the old days where it was mostly just links around to academic resources).  The original web concept more closely resembles todays' search engines where you are provided pointers to existing data.  It was designed as an easy way to index and make available existing non-published information much like old systems such as Gopher did.  However, instead of reformatting the information so it could fit into Gopher, you would just link your text, zip, image, whatever file from an webpage (still using a subset of SGML tags, before HTML was standardized) and post that index page to a web server.  Suddenly, anyone who can get to your web server can access any file you've linked, all with minimal effort on your part.

You can still read the original announcement posted to the alt.hypertext group thanks to the wonders of Google Groups.

It's hard to believe that just 15 years ago, none of this existed, that the entire concept of what the Internet was, was limited to the academic and government spheres.  It's also interesting to see how the entire WWW idea morphed over time as the public took ownership of it.  What was once meant to be a method for indexing and making available existing data in various formats, it has become the preferred method to store and publish information in the first place.  How often do you download a word doc from a weblog?  Chances are most of the content is in the HTML itself.