The History of the World Wide Web

A British scientist named Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web (WWW) in 1989, while he was working at CERN. The Web was originally created to facilitate automated information-sharing between scientists working at different universities and institutes around the world. Berners-Lee wrote the first proposal for the project in 1989 and the second in 1990. He worked with a Belgian systems engineer named Robert Cailliau to formalize a management proposal in late 1990, which described a “hypertext project” called “WorldWideWeb” that allowed a “web” of “hypertext documents” to be viewed by “browsers.” By the end of 1990, Berners-Lee had the first Web server and browser running at CERN. The first Web page address was http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html; it primarily contained links to information about the project. On April 30, 1992, CERN made the source code of the WorldWideWeb available for free and by the end of 1994, the Web had 10,000 servers and 10 million users. CERN and Berners-Lee then turned their attention to ensuring that the Web remained open standard for all to use (rather than getting locked up in a proprietary system); the result was the International World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which still exists today.