Happy Internaut Day!

Hey, Internet (or is it just “internet” now?) you’re 25 years old? You don’t look a day over 24!

The internet was supposedly opened to the public on August 23, 1991. The problem with this date doesn’t seem to have any relevance in the history of the internet or the web. Who doesn’t love a little contrarian history? Go read a debunking by Fortune:

The building blocks (the HTML language, URI web addresses, and the HTTP protocol) were specified and written up by October 1990. The first webpage went live in December of that year. To quote the Web Foundation’s Berners-Lee-approved history: “By the end of 1990, the first web page was served on the open internet.”

So technically, the world-wide web has been on the internet for more than a quarter century. Only they didn’t tell anyone about it until a news group post on August 6, 1991. And of course, the first graphical web browser program, Mosaic, wasn’t released until 1993.

So happy roughly 24-26th birthday, internet!