Digital Innovation Days

When the world’s first ever web server (http://info.cern.ch/) went live at CERN (the European Organisation for Nuclear Research) on the 24th of December, 1990, it marked the creation of one of the four essentials of the World Wide Web: HTML, web protocol, web browser, and web server. Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, set up a NeXT computer at CERN as the first ever server. However, this web server was more of a small intranet for information sharing among CERN physicists rather than being “world wide”.

By 1991, several other web servers had been created, all located at CERN. By this time, it had been successfully tested that document retrieval could be performed from web servers on incompatible computer systems. However, since all the web servers were at CERN, the possibility of retrieving data from halfway across the world was questionable. To do so, a computer was set up with the help of Paul Kunz, a physicist at Stanford University. This server was located at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) and by the end of 1991, it went live, becoming the first web server outside Europe.

What started from a single NeXT computer at a nuclear research lab in Europe has now grown into an indispensable part of the internet globally. A world without web servers means a world where information cannot be retrieved from any part of the world within an instant - essentially unimaginable. The millions of servers online are responsible for displaying website content by storing, preprocessing, and delivering the requested web pages to users. The sheer significance of this invention can be gauged by the fact that all data that are shared over the internet today are hosted on web servers. And while the first web server could only retrieve data from other servers located in CERN, today this retrieval can quickly be done across oceans and continents.

Larry Wall released the general-purpose programming language Perl on the 18th of December, 1987. It was meant to offer text manipulation, web development, network programming, system administration, and Graphics User Interface (GUI) development, among other tasks. With its tagline, “easy things should be easy and hard things should be possible”, Perl was designed to make computer programming easier and faster.

With the advent of the web, Perl also gained momentum. In fact, it became the dominant language for Common Interface Gateway (CGI) programming. The regular expression and string parsing abilities that this language offered brought it immense popularity as well. System administration tasks that were too complex for a shell script but not worth the effort when coding in C, were easily done with Perl. This also became the perfect language to interact with databases, leading to its widespread use to implement dynamic websites. True to its motto of TIMTOWTDI (“there is more than one way to do it”), Perl cemented its position as a very versatile and flexible language since it allowed the user to adopt any kind of programming style, be it procedural or object-oriented.

Although Perl may not be sitting atop the list of the most commonly-used programming languages today, its uniqueness largely stems from its compatibility with other programming languages. Perl is being used throughout the web and it is also termed as the “duct tape of the Internet” because it tied together systems and interfaces that could not work together prior to Perl. While many think that Perl has “died” as a language now, it is still being heavily used not just for maintaining existing projects but also for creating new ones. In fact, it is still considered among the best coding languages to increase one’s employability as well as remuneration.

Google marked the release of its web browser on the 11th of December, 2008, when it launched the first stable public version of Chrome. Although the tech giant had previously released 3 versions for testing, they were beta versions. With the release of version 1, Chrome entered a market where users were growing frustrated with Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox was gaining momentum. By 2013, Chrome was dominating the web browser industry, clearly surpassing Internet Explorer and Firefox.

The software used certain features from Apple’s WebKit open-source rendering engine as well as Firefox, and its source code was made available by Google as part of its Chromium project. Google Chrome stood out due to a multitude of features. For starters, it strictly focused on web standards. This came at a time when Microsoft was struggling with proprietary web standards for its own web navigator, Internet Explorer. Chrome also introduced the idea of sandboxing in a web browser. By sandboxing individual tabs, if one of them crashed, the others would not be affected. This led to improved speed and stability although it required each tab to use as much dedicated memory as the first one. However, when any tab was closed, it released its allocated memory, effectively solving a problem many older browsers were facing and which could only be fixed by restarting them.

Today, Google Chrome is the undisputed leader in web browsers. With a market share of nearly 65%, it is the most popular web browser in 2021. It is more than just a web navigator now. In fact, it can be viewed as a complete platform that can run on different operating systems including Windows, Android, Linux, macOS, and iOS. From its release till now, Google Chrome has added value for the users and helped drive innovation in the field.

Now more than ever, digital technology has become a staple in our professional and private life.

The revolution can’t be ignored as it is changing the way people travel, work, interact & organize their daily activities. And it does it at high speed.

With some of the enthusiasm brought by this digital age, this podcast is about celebrating impactful innovations on their day of birth. 

We’ll find out how some brillant minds set the path with new ways to solve old business problems, create new opportunities, and changed the society entirely.

I’m your host, Vincent Giraud. Welcome to the digital innovation days!