The World Wide Web is celebrating its 25th birthday

The global system of interconnected computer networks, known as the Internet, 25 years ago was quite different than it is today, and thanks to the idea developed by the then unknown computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee, the Internet service World Wide Web, today it is a worldwide phenomenon that has changed the lives of billions of people.

The British Berners-Lee was working in the laboratory of CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, when he came up with a way to easily access interconnected computer documents using hypertext. He described this in a paper published on March 12, 1989, which is considered the birth day of the World Wide Web. His idea enabled the development of the Internet as we know it today.

But the idea was so daring that it almost didn't come true.

"Tim Berners-Lee came out of nowhere, nobody asked him for that document management system," said Mark Weber, author and curator of the Internet History Program at the Museum of Computer History in Mountain View, California, adding that his colleagues initially " completely ignored," AFP reports.

In the beginning, the Internet had rivals like, for example, CompuServe and Minitel. But they were not free, and the system conceived by Berners-Lee made it possible to publish content for free on computers connected to the network, Weber points out.

"The personal computer has changed the way we work, and the Internet has fundamentally changed a number of sectors," points out Michael Maguire, analyst at research agency Gartner.

Today, the Internet is used by billions of people around the world, and the invention of the World Wide Web strongly influenced many areas of life and changed human society forever.