Twenty-five years ago, British computer scientist Sir Tim Berners-Lee made a proposal for what we know now as the Word Wide Web.

Håkon Wium Lie, our Chief Technology Officer, worked with Berners-Lee in the early 90s. He is also widely known as “Father of CSS.” He recalls the first time he realized how big the World Wide Web could get.

“When I first saw HTML code on my screen, I thought ‘Wow’. The fact that you could build global hypertext systems with an amazingly simple code was an eye-opener for me. We were going around some universities to demo it – the internet started out as a sort of sandbox or playing field for researchers. Now, I look around and I feel proud of all that the web has become. People are using CSS and HTML in ways we never imagined. The web is a positive force. It’s human communication. Everything we put on the web is a master copy of humankind’s knowledge.”

To celebrate the 25th year of the Web, here are 25 facts we think you’ll find interesting:

1989: Tim Berners-Lee and the team at CERN invented the World Wide Web.

1990: The Archie Search Engine was created at McGill University. It is considered to be the first internet search engine.

1991: The first ever website went live.

1992: The phrase surfing the internet was coined by Jean Armour Polly.

1993: The Mosaic web browser, often described as the first graphical web browser, was launched.

1994: Yahoo! was launched. It first came out as a web directory.

1995: Opera was born! We turned 18 years old last year.

1996: Nokia released its first phone with internet access, the Nokia 9000 Communicator.

1997: BabelFish, the first automatic-translation application, was launched.

1998: The Google search engine was born.

1999: Napster was launched, changing the way we find and consume music online.

2000:  By 2000, over 20 million websites were up and running.

2001: The first Wikipedia article was published.

2002: Social-networking site Friendster was launched. Today, Friendster now runs as a social-gaming site.

2003: Skype, a voice and video-calling service, was released.

2004: Facebook went online.

2005: The first ever video on YouTube was uploaded. It has a guy and a zoo in it.

2006: Twttr was launched. It’s now called Twitter today and is one of the most used social media services.

2007: Apple released the iPhone, changing the way people use mobile browsers.

2008: Dropbox was launched at TechCrunch50.

2009: WhatsApp, a cross-platform mobile messaging app, was launched.

2010: Instagram was launched. Now, we could finally take pictures of our food.

2011: Google+ was released. It was first launched as an invite-only service.

2012: More than 115,000 websites participated in the largest online protest in history. It was a protest against internet censorship bills SOPA and PIPA.

2013: Internet.org, a project by Facebook in partnership with Opera and other technology companies, was announced. Its aim is to connect the next 5 billion people online.

2014: The year has just begun! What do you think is the most important event so far?

---