There are milestone anniversaries that can't be celebrated often enough. 30 years ago, on April 30, 1993, the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) made the program code of the World Wide Web (WWW) available to the public, thus establishing an unprecedented triumph of Web technology. However, August 6, 1991, the day on which the web concept was published in a group on Usenet, is also considered the birthday of the web. Or the days around Christmas 1990, when the first web server went online.

No matter what anniversary you celebrate, the driving force behind the development of the WWW was the Briton Tim Berners-Lee, a fast-talking physicist who is bubbling over with ideas. At the time, the researcher was working at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva and not only wanted to sort out and network his own train of thought, but also to limit the notorious information chaos at CERN.

In March 1989, Berners-Lee had already published a paper in which the principles of the Web were presented: a digital information network in which the content is prepared as universal hypertext and networked with clickable links. Within a few months, Berners-Lee developed the necessary components: URLs such as info.cern.ch for web addresses, the page description language HTML for web pages, the technical protocol HTTP for links and the concept for a web browser.

Hardly anyone believed in the idea

However, the Briton initially received little support from the top management of CERN: "Vague but exciting" - "Vague, but exciting" was the handwritten comment of his boss Mike Sendall on the title page of the memo. "There was no forum from which I could expect an answer. Nothing happened," Berners-Lee later recalled in his book "The Web Report."

At the time, cross-platform digital communication was difficult to imagine, and not only for the heads of CERN. At the end of the 80s, the online world still consisted of isolated online services. In the U.S., services such as CompuServe and AOL competed for users, while in Germany, the Federal Post Office took its first steps into the online world in 1977 with on-screen text (Btx). In 1992, however, Btx boss Eric Danke counted only about 320,000 subscribers, although the service should have been a service with several million members according to the original forecasts. Things went better with the technically comparable Minitel system in France, which was found in most households. However, neither Btx, nor AOL, nor Minitel could easily share the content on their platforms with other services.

With the World Wide Web, this was to change radically. But before the web could actually assert itself internationally, it needed start-up help from the USA. The web of Tim Berners-Lee and his colleague Robert Cailliau still lacked a proper browser with a graphical user interface for PCs, Macs and the Unix workstations commonly used in computer science. CERN was not in a position to finance this development.

Knightly Order for these merits

This task was then taken over by developers from the USA. In 1991, the University of California at Berkeley created the browser ViolaWWW, which soon disappeared into oblivion. A real breakthrough for web technology, on the other hand, was made by student Marc Andreessen. He developed the first Mosaic browser 30 years ago at the University of Illinois and later set out with Netscape to make his software the leading online platform.

But Netscape's success didn't last forever either. Microsoft founder Bill Gates recognized the trend in 1994, called for a chase and instigated the "browser war" in which Netscape fell by the wayside. In the meantime, Microsoft's Internet Explorer is also history. The browser market has been dominated by Google Chrome for desktop and Android smartphones and Apple's Safari for iPhone for over ten years

Tim Berners-Lee went to the USA in 1994 to found the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Under his leadership, this committee continues to standardize the technical developments of the web to this day. For his services, the Briton was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II and received the order "Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire". In 1997, he was included in the Order of Merit, which was limited to only 24 people. In 2009, Berners-Lee received the Webby Award, the most important award in the online space, for his lifetime achievement. Since 2016, the Briton has held a chair at the University of Oxford. However, Berners-Lee never became rich through his invention.

The Briton is worried about his invention. On the 30th anniversary of the publication of his landmark paper, he warned against data misuse, disinformation, hate speech and censorship. Berners-Lee is also critical of attempts to use blockchain technology to build the next generation of the web, in which it should be easier to pay for content. Cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin are "just speculation," Berners-Lee said in an interview with CNBC.