The World Wide Web can now drive. Sixteen years ago yesterday, in a [short post to the alt.hypertext newsgroup][2], Tim Berners-Lee revealed the first public web pages summarizing his World Wide Web project.

The first pages represented eleven years of work, beginning with the time Berners-Lee spent at CERN, an international particle physics lab located near Geneva, Switzerland, where he developed, along with Robert Cailliau, the Enquire project, the forerunner to what would become the web.

The strange thing is that, while the web has become much more powerful and probably far more successful than Berners-Lee could ever have imagined, the underlying technology remains largely as it was when it first launched.

For more background see, [Tony Long's column][1] in Wired's Discoveries section.


[1]: http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2007/08/dayintech_0807
[2]: http://groups.google.com/group/alt.hypertext/msg/395f282a67a1916c