Internet celebrates 25th anniversary

The internet is celebrating the 25th anniversary of its availability as a public service.

The internet is celebrating the 25th anniversary of its availablity as a public service. (AAP)

It's 25 years since the internet became a publicly available service.

British computer scientist Sir Tim Berners-Lee gave birth to the idea while working at a Swiss physics laboratory in 1989.

The first server was launched publicly, two years later, on August 6, 1991.

Sir Tim originally developed the web to meet the demand for information-sharing between physicists in universities and institutes around the world.

Other information retrieval systems which used the net - such as WAIS and Gopher - were available at the time but the web's simplicity, along with the fact the technology was made royalty-free in 1993, led to its rapid adoption and development.

By late 1993, there were more than 500 known web servers and the world wide web accounted for one per cent of internet traffic.

More than two decades later, there are an estimated billion websites online.