It's been 25 years since the World Wide Web was made available to the public by its creator Tim Berners-Lee. To commemorate Aug. 23, 1991, the day is celebrated as Happy Internaut Day! Internaut is a portmanteau word made from 'Internet' and 'astronaut.'
Internaut denotes someone who is an habitual or skilled user of the Internet.
Berners-Lee, a British scientist at CERN Switzerland, allowed access to the common public in 1991. He had invented the WWW in 1989 when he was working at CERN. Initially, it was created for information sharing only between scientists across the world.
It has now become an integral part of 2.8 billion people. While there are still many who don't have access to it, the number of Internet users increases every day.
In June 2016, the creator of the Internet had said that he wants it to be decentralised.
"It controls what people see, creates mechanisms for how people interact," he said of the modern day web. "It's been great, but spying, blocking sites, repurposing people's content, taking you to the wrong websites â€" that completely undermines the spirit of helping people create."
Edward Snowden showed we've inadvertently built the world's largest surveillance network with the web," Brewster Kahle, head of the nonprofit Internet Archive and an internet activist, was quoted as saying by the New York Times. "China can make it impossible for people there to read things, and just a few big service providers are the de facto organizers of your experience. We have the ability to change all that."
Here is what Twitterati had to say about the Internaut Day:
