World Wide Web goes public

January 1991 the first Web servers outside CERN itself were switched on. On August 6, 1991, Berners-Lee posted a short summary of the World Wide Web project on the alt.hypertext newsgroup. This date also marked the debut of the Web as a publicly available service on the Internet. While CERN would not place the Web software in the public domain until 30 April 1993, this event twenty months earlier ushered in a new era of information accessibility. Tim Berners-Lee’s idea unleashed a rush of digital inventiveness, as within just a few years of even this launch, artists would be making the first net art. This would of course impact programmatic art, as much of the later part of the decade was spent creating the early tooling (e.g., ACU, DBN) for visual creatives and not computer scientists. As previously mentioned, the Web propelled the rise of mass-media art, but it also represented the democratization of online spaces, which would fuel generative art by allowing creators all over the globe to share their thoughts, cooperate across borders and alter the bounds of artistic expression in the digital age.