WorldWideWeb showing many of its functions. (Image: Tim Berners-Lee for CERN/Public domain)
In this 50-year retrospective, we're looking at technologies that had an impact on the world, paved the way for the future, and changed us, in ways good and bad.
Previously, we explored the 1980s[1]. Now we continue our time travels in the 1990s.
1990: WorldWideWeb, the first Web browser
Of all the technologies that changed our lives, perhaps the most profound of the last 50 years has been the web. But it wasn't the ability to hyperlink documents that made the most impact. Instead, it was the application that presented all that information to users, the browser.
Read also: No internet: The unbearable anxiety of losing your connection[2]
The browser, in combination with the various web protocols, allowed access to the web from a wide variety of operating systems and devices. It allowed untrained users to click and browse from website to website. But even before there were public websites, there needed to be a browser.
That browser was initially called WorldWideWeb[3]. It's name was later changed to Nexus to avoid confusion with the entity we now call the web, but back then was the World Wide Web or WWW. The web changed the world, but it was the browser that delivered those changes worldwide.
Runner up: Windows 3.0[4].
Floppy disks holding a very early version of Linux. (Image: Shermozle/Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license)
1991: Linux
We're now into the 1990s and technology change is accelerating. The first website[5] went online at CERN. In fact, so much happened that we have a