Yesterday was the 20th birthday of the World Wide Web. It was March 1989 when an English physicist called Sir Tim Berners-Lee wrote a proposal that was the outline for the World Web Web, the structure which has formed the Internet as we now know it.

I tweeted about this yesterday morning and wondered out loud what we would do without it. So of the responses I got was pretty interesting:

Noirist @nikolena be bored to death, not have a life…need I enumerate all the scenarios? lol

fernfiddlehead @nikolena I can imagine a world without it.

ilovemakonnen @nikolena I CANT EVEN THINK OF THE WORLD WITHOUT IT!

Just the mere fact that I was able to communicate that bit of news, wonder about it, and get a bunch of responses within 5 minutes shows how much the world and the the web itself has changed in the past 20 years. When I was growing up I couldn’t have imagined that I was going to become a web designer because…there was no such thing when my teacher asked me what I was going to be when I grew up. But for my 16 year-old god daughter, there really was never a world without the web and it’s entirely normal that she talks to me through instant message and Facebook as much as she does over the phone or in person.

Could I have imagined when I was making my first web page back in 1995 that the web would the first place I go to for news, movie times, and how to spell a word instead of the television, the newspaper, and the dictionary? Could I have imagined that I would have made a small career out of helping artists make their way around the web? Or that I would use it to watch a historic presidential inaugaration as it was happening while monitoring what other people where thinking and feeling on Twitter and Facebook? Could I have even imagined Twitter and Facebook?

Nope…I sure couldn’t imagine what it would be like back then…and I can’t imagine life without it now.

Happy birthday World Wide Web! Can’t wait to see what you’ll be like in another 20 years! :)

What do you think of the web and where we are now? What do you think life would be without it?