On August 23, 1991, 25 years ago today, the World Wide Web was open to everyone. The term internaut is made from a combination of “internet” and astronaut.” Today, there are over 2.8 billion internauts!
Tim Berners-Lee, a British scientist at CERN, invented the World Wide Web (WWW) in 1989.
It was developed to allows information exchange between scientists in universities and institutes around the world.
On August 23, 1991, Berners-Lee allowed the access to WWW to the general public.
Berners-Lee is a vocal opponent of software patents. But his invention, the WWW has sparked tens of thousands of patents if not millions.
One of the first patents on interactive web was awarded to Michael Doyle. Doyle claims that he and two co-inventors came up with the interactive web at the University of California in 1993. They filed for the patent (viewable here) in 1994 and were awarded it in 1998
Publication number: US5838906 A
Patent Title: Distributed hypermedia method for automatically invoking external application providing interaction and display of embedded objects within a hypermedia document
Publication date: Nov 17, 1998
Filing date: Oct 17, 1994
Priority date: Oct 17, 1994
Inventors: Michael D. Doyle, David C. Martin, Cheong S. Ang
Original Assignee: The Regents Of The University Of California
