"One key date is 6 August 1991 - the day on which links to the fledgling computer code for the www were put on the alt.hypertext discussion group so others could download it and play with it.
On that day the web went world wide...
But though physicists were being won over by the web's promise, in the early years few others grasped its potential.
This was because, said Mr Kunz, many other technologies existed that did a similar job. Many people got hold of key documents using the File Transfer Protocol (FTP) and used Usenet as a means to express themselves.
Particularly popular was a technology known as Gopher developed at the University of Minnesota that also put a friendly face on the blooming complexity of the computers connected to the internet. It got the name partly because the college's sports team is called the Golden Gophers.
Gopher was released in Spring 1991 and for a few years statistics showed far more gopher traffic was passing across the net than web traffic...
In late 1994 web traffic finally overtook gopher traffic and has never looked back. Now there are almost 100 million websites and many consider the web and the net indistinguishable.
But, said Mr Groff, only now is the web meeting the vision that the pioneers had for it.
The original conception was for a medium that people both read and contributed to. New tools such as photo-sharing sites, social networks, blogs, wikis and others are making good on that early promise, he said.
The web may be worldwide but it is only just getting started. "
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