Forum Software Reviews

Last Saturday, the 6th of August 2011, 20 years exactly have passed since the first website ever was launched. Many people, including the CERN, in Switzerland, where Internet was born, consider March 1989 the moment when the concept of Internet was introduced. However, it took a bit more than two years to implement everything and launch the first Web site of Internet: http://info.cern.ch.

The funny link with forums is that the Web protocol, that, at the beginning was simply HTTP + an embryo of HTML for formatting the content and define the concept of hyperlinks, is a quite young protocol, since it was invented in 1991, while the Usenet protocol, that we consider as the ancestor of Web Forums we know, was actually older, as it was created 12 years before the other.

It helps us reminding that, even if Internet is now more or less equals to Web for most people, Usenet protocol and communicating using forums on top of Usenet were one of the first brick of what Internet was at the beginning.

Just as a reminder, here are the official dates of creation of Internet protocols:

• 1969: Internet
• 1971: FTP
• 1971/1972: Email (POP)
• 1979: Newsgroups
• 1979: Usenet
• 1988: IRC
• 1991: Web

Surprisingly, even IRC is older than the Web protocol!