Q: Aren’t we into the 25th year of the World Wide Web? On what date did it make its debut? What corporation, business or government agency had the first website?
—Lance DeLoach, Thomaston
A: The Internet has been around in some form since the 1960s, but the World Wide Web was invented by computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee on March 12, 1989, when he proposed an "information management" system that grew into the web.
He produced the first website on Aug. 6, 1991, a simple page that he titled “World Wide Web,” from the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) lab in Switzerland. He wrote: “The WorldWideWeb (W3) is a wide-area hypermedia information retrieval initiative aiming to give universal access to a large universe of documents.”
Several labs had websites in 1991 and ’92. The web grew to 623 websites by the end of 1993, according to an MIT researcher, including sites for MTV and the Internet Movie Database (IMDB.com). Websites for Pizza Hut, Yahoo and the White House (whitehouse.gov) were among the thousands that were launched in 1994.
Q: What is the racial makeup of the jury in the Burrell Ellis case?
—Lynn Stitt, Snellville
A: The jury consists of 10 black women and two white women. Two black men and one black woman are the alternates. The jury is in deliberations to decide if Ellis, the suspended CEO of DeKalb County, is guilty of 13 felony charges, including bribery, theft, extortion and perjury. The trial began on Sept. 8.
Andy Johnston wrote this column. Do you have a question about the news? We’ll try to get the answer. Call 404-222-2002 or email q&a@ajc.com (include name, phone and city).
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