Mohamed Nanabhay's Blog

Apparently the World Wide Web (www) turned twenty on Friday. It was very much a non-event for most people using the web (including myself and everyone around me). Non the less I got a call late Friday from a friend who said "It's the 20th anniversary of the internet and we're doing a story - could you do an interview on it?". To which I replied who the heck told you that? The internet is not twenty years old...after a few seconds it registered that perhaps they meant the web (it took a while to make the connection since I had placed the start of the web around '93 or so). A quick check on Wikipedia revealed that Sir Tim Berners Lee had written the paper that would lay the basis for what would become the www in March 1989.

I then spent the next day and half explaining to everyone involved with the clip and interview that the internet and the www were not the same thing. Do you know how hard that is? It's not as if you can say "the web is just another service ontop of the internet - like IRC, FTP, SSH or whatever" since most people have never used any other service. Finally I settled on "the internet is like a road and the www is type of car. There are other types of cars travelling on the road as well...". The metaphor worked well since I then went on to use it to explain net neutrality to the interview producer as being one the big issues facing the internet going forward.

The irony? After singing that the internet and interwebs were different I went on to use them interchangebly during my interview.... ;-)