CDS (II) 2023 General Knowledge · Question 59 of 120

Correct — D, the World Wide Web dated to 1995. The Web is a good deal older than that. Tim Berners-Lee circulated his proposal at CERN in March 1989, and by December 1990 he and his team had the first browser, the first server and the first website working; info.cern.ch went up on 20 December 1990. CERN then released the code into the public domain on 30 April 1993, which is the moment the Web became free for anyone to use. What happened in 1995 was different — commercial restrictions on the Internet were lifted and the second version of HTML appeared, so the Web went mainstream, but it was already five or six years old. That single mismatch is enough, and the other three pairings are the ones the paper treats as sound: 1962 for the first communications satellite, 1977 for SWIFT and 1997 for the completion of a continuous fibre-optic link around the world.

• (a)Launch of the first communications satellite : 1962 — Treated as correctly matched. Telstar 1 went up on 10 July 1962 and was the first active telecommunications satellite, carrying the first live television across the Atlantic. Worth knowing that earlier craft existed — the American SCORE in December 1958 and the passive reflector Echo 1 in 1960 — so a strict reading of 'first' could be argued; the key does not treat this as the mismatch.
• (b)Completion of a continuous around the world fibre-optic cable link : 1997 — Correctly matched. The Fibre-optic Link Around the Globe, which ran from Britain to Japan by way of the Mediterranean, the Gulf, India and Southeast Asia, entered service in 1997 and completed the girdle of submarine fibre.
• (c)Creation of the SWIFT system for worldwide electronic interbank fund transfer : 1977 — Correctly matched. The Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication was set up in Brussels in 1973 and its network went live in 1977 with the first live message, which is the date the pairing uses.

This is a shrinking-world question. Four technologies — satellite relay, electronic interbank messaging, submarine fibre and the Web — are the usual milestones used to date the compression of distance in the second half of the twentieth century. Each has a headline year: 1962 for live television across an ocean, 1977 for banks talking to each other electronically, 1997 for fibre closing the loop around the planet, and 1989 to 1993 for the Web.

Three of the four years here are obscure enough that no candidate should expect to know them cold; only one is a date everybody has some grip on, and that is the Web. The examiner has built the item so that the checkable pair is the wrong one, which is a kindness once you notice it. The reasoning shortcut is that the Web is the youngest technology on the list, so a date of 1995 for its introduction sits suspiciously close to the 1997 fibre milestone — and the Web plainly predates the fibre girdle rather than nearly coinciding with it. On the honest side: the phrase 'first communications satellite' in the 1962 pairing is loose, since passive and store-and-forward satellites flew before Telstar, but the key marks only the Web pairing as the mismatch and that is the answer to give.

• Berners-Lee's proposal at CERN is dated March 1989; the first website went live on 20 December 1990.
• CERN placed the Web's underlying code in the public domain on 30 April 1993.
• Telstar 1, launched 10 July 1962, was the first active telecommunications satellite and carried the first live transatlantic television.
• SWIFT was founded at Brussels in 1973 and its network carried its first live message in 1977.
• The Fibre-optic Link Around the Globe entered service in 1997.

• Dating the Web to the year it became popular rather than the year it was created.
• Treating the Internet and the Web as the same thing — the Internet's ancestry runs back to ARPANET in 1969.
• Assuming 'first communications satellite' has a single uncontested answer; Telstar was the first active one, but SCORE and Echo flew earlier.

As an event-and-year pairing where one row is deliberately wrong, or as a single question on who created the Web and when.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The World Wide Web was proposed at CERN in which year?

  • (a)1969
  • (b)1989
  • (c)1993
  • (d)1995

  Answer(b) 1989 — Tim Berners-Lee's proposal; the first website followed in December 1990 and CERN released the code publicly in 1993.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Telstar 1, launched in 1962, is remembered chiefly for being the first satellite to

  • (a)orbit the Moon
  • (b)carry a live television broadcast across the Atlantic
  • (c)reach geostationary orbit
  • (d)carry a human crew

  Answer(b) carry a live television broadcast across the Atlantic — it was the first active telecommunications satellite.