Okay, that headline is a bit misleading because World Wide Web, or W3, is actually older than 19, but on April 30, 1993 it officially entered open-source. That was probably the biggest open source project in history and it was instituted by the “father of the internet”, Tim Berners-Lee while working at CERN in Switzerland.
Berners-Lee, in 1989, wrote the original proposal to use hypertext to “link and access information of various kinds as a web of nodes in which the user can browse at will”. When the project was released to the public domain on this day in 1993 the official document announcing it referred to it as “a global computer networked information system” It went on to state that “CERN’s intention in this is to further compatibility, common practices, and standards in networking and computer supported collaboration”.
The original browser, simply called “World Wide Web” is still available for download today. The file size is measured in kilobytes, as opposed to today’s browsers which are many times that size.