Happy Birthday, WWW! 万维网诞生20周年

By Valdirene Ruston, BBC Learning English

Tim Berners-Lee prepared the first webpage in a laboratory in Switzerland

媒体英语会带大家一起学习BBC撰稿人在报道世界大事时常用到的单词和短语。

Background: 英国科学家蒂姆·伯纳斯（Tim Berners-Lee）20年前创造了第一个网页。发展到今天，万维网已经拥有一万亿左右的网页。万维网彻底改变了我们人与人之间的交流方式，很多人甚至无法想象没有网络的生活。你觉得呢？你通常使用网络都做些什么呢？请发邮件告诉我们 chinaelt@bbc.co.uk.

On Christmas Day 1990, in a laboratory in Switzerland, British physicist Tim Berners-Lee finished developing the tools to create the World Wide Web. He was working at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research, Cern, in Geneva.

His boss gave him the green light to work on the project during his spare time and together with the help of his Belgian colleague Robert Cailliau, Tim Berners-Lee produced the world's first webpage.

The experiment heralded a new era because it demonstrated how computers could talk to each other through a new language they created called Hyper-Text Markup Language, or HTML.

Currently there might be anything up to a trillion webpages with all sorts of content. People buy and sell products and services, make friends through these pages, learn and teach. We found many enthusiasts of the web in the streets of London.

Man 1: “It means having information in your home with easy access which in the past would have only been available in thousands of libraries. So it’s information at your fingertips.”

Woman: “Access to a lot of people really. We’ve got a lot of family overseas so we use Skype quite a bit.”

Man 2: “Information, news, social groups.”

Man 3: “I’m just using it usually for emails and social networking with my friends and well, reading newspapers and information. Basically everything!”

Fortunes were made in the World Wide Web. Many say that Tim Berners-Lee could have been a billionaire through his invention but he said that all he wants is to keep the egalitarian spirit of the web intact and the medium free to use. Many users share the same ideals.

Man 1: “I think that today it is essential to have an internet connection and that’s going to be a real problem in terms of you know, digital divide when some people in the world can’t access the internet or when the speed (connection speed) is not enough.”

And there are other concerns.

Woman: “I’m not very keen on that because of all the privacy issues and everything, I’m very aware of it. So I try to keep private things private as much as I can.”

And there are the diehards, who shy away from technology.

Man 2: “I leave it all to my wife, I hate computers.”