As Dell EMC continues to innovate in SaaS, hybrid and public cloud technologies, here’s a hat-tip to another innovation that enables us to #GoBigWinBig – the World Wide Web, “born” on November 12, 1990.Some interesting facts about the World Wide Web:
- The Internet and the World Wide Web are not the same thing. I’m sure some of you know that, but many don’t. Webopedia describes the Internet as “a massive network of networks, a networking infrastructure,” and the World Wide Web as an “information-sharing model that is built on top of the Internet.” In other words, the World Wide Web is a “portion of the Internet.”
- The World Wide Web has two parents – Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau. They made a proposal to CERN on November 12, 1990 for a hypertext project to solve inefficiencies caused by “incompatibilities of the platforms and tools [that] make it impossible to access existing information through a common interface, leading to waste of time, frustration and obsolete answers to simple data lookup.”
- Their original proposal provided early support for the concepts of open source and freeware. The proposal stipulated that information was open to additional enrichment by later contributors, and would “provide the software for the above free of charge to anyone.”
With the World Wide Web project, and the subsequent release of the Web browser Mosaic by Marc Andreessen in 1993, SaaS and Cloud as we know them today could be born.
The World Wide Web: Fundamental to the growth of SaaS and Cloud
With Web-enabled, browser-based applications, a global community of users was possible. And that possibility led to potential communities becoming growth markets for a new “computing paradigm where the boundaries of computing will be determined by economic rationale rather than technical limits alone.” The term “cloud computing,” to describe this change in boundary, was first used in 1997 by Ramnath Chellappa at that year’s Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS) conference.
And as noted by Ana Cantu (formerly of Dell) in Forbes, “Within just a few years, companies began switching from hardware to cloud services because they were attracted to benefits like a reduction in capital costs as well as an easing in IT staffing issues.”
The World Wide Web: A key part of how and why Dell EMC will #GoBigWinBig
With tens of thousands of employees around the globe, innovation at the speed of business would not be possible without the World Wide Web. Not only do our colleagues, partners, and customers rely on the Web, Dell EMC is the leader in technologies that fundamentally enable the Web:
- Servers, which are vital for cloud technology architectures
- Storage, without which there’d be no access to the information used in business at compute speed
- Data protection, ensuring the value provided by these technologies is not held hostage by ransomware and hacking, or accidentally destroyed by human error – across all use cases, even at the endpoint, or when subscribed to SaaS applications like Office 365, Salesforce, or G Suite (Google Apps)
So today, if you haven’t yet done so, take a minute to think about how – less than 30 years ago – our world changed, as the World Wide Web was born. Happy birthday, Web! We can’t wait to see what the next 30 years brings.