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The holidays have been rough for the Newtown Police Department, which is why officers from across Connecticut joining forces, so that not a single Newtown officer has to work on Christmas Day. The plan has been kept on the down low for the past few days, since the various police departments are making the effort not for the press but as a gesture of solidarity with their fellow officers. After whispers of the touching gesture from local law enforcement emerged on Twitter over the weekend, however, the Newtown Police Department confirmed the news in an interview with The Atlantic Wire on Monday. “They’ve been actually non-stop with their aid. It’s pretty amazing,” said Newtown police spokesperson Sergeant Steve Santucci said of his fellow Connecticut officers. “And tomorrow, they’ll be at our assistance so that Newtown [officers] can be home with their families.”

But wait there’s more. One of the only perks about working on Christmas Day is overtime and holiday pay. Just as they’re not doing it for the press, though, many of the officers filling in at Newtown aren’t interested in the money, so they’re reportedly donating their paychecks to Newtown and Sandy Hill Elementary School charities. At least, those ones that are even accepting payment are. Santucci said that he knew some of the officers were volunteering their time on Tuesday but wasn’t able to say who was making donations or how much money would be raised, since the Christmas Day pay would be coming from officers’ hometown departments.

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Twenty two years ago today, a British physicist, former trainspotter, science fiction fan and computer builder, with the help of Robert Cailliau and other colleagues at CERN, executed the first successful communication between a HTTP client and server on the Internet.
The web was devised in France (not Switzerland), and built on decades of hypertext and internet protocol developments. The first browser was called WorldWideWeb and ran on the NeXT computer. The first website was info.cern.ch. Despite promotion of the system within CERN, take-up was low for the first year or two.

By the end of 1993, there were 623 websites. In May 1994, the First International Conference on the World-Wide Web was held (at which the first Best of the Web award winners were announced), attracting 380 participants; the preliminary proceedings are downloadable. In 1995, Matt Haughey designed his first website; in June of that year, there were 23,500 websites – or less than 20,000.

However, within 18 months (by the end of 1996), there were over 600,000 websites. In 1998 the first Google index recognized 26 million pages, and by 2000 the number of pages in the “surface” web was measurable in the billions.

Estimates of how many websites there are varies as years progress, as does the number of web pages. Some more well-known earlier websites.

The author of the software participated in the opening ceremony of this summer’s Olympic Games, during which he tweeted. Not everyone knew who he was. This didn’t bother him and he won’t tell you what he had for breakfast.

Family fact: his father worked in the team which developed the world’s first commercially available general-purpose electronic computer, followed by text compression techniques and some of the earliest applications of computers in medicine.