How it began
Tim Berners-Lee, a British scientist, invented the World Wide Web in 1989 while working at CERN, an international scientific organization based in Geneva, Switzerland. He wrote the first proposal, for a distributed information system, in March 1989. By the end of 1990 he had the first web server and browser running at CERN. The first website, info.cern.ch, was dedicated to the World Wide Web project itself and was hosted on his NeXT computer.
Before it existed
At CERN, Berners-Lee had earlier written Enquire, a program that stored information in files with links between them, a technique that became known as hypertext. His 1989 proposal aimed to let researchers share their results and techniques easily through a global hypertext system that used the Internet.
How it works
A web page is a hypertext document written in HyperText Markup Language, HTML, and it has an address called a Uniform Resource Locator, URL. A server stores the files to be shared, and a client program, the browser, fetches and displays them. The two communicate through the HyperText Transfer Protocol, HTTP, which Berners-Lee and his colleagues created to standardize communication between servers and clients. Hyperlinks in a page lead to other pages.
How it spread
On April 30, 1993, CERN put the World Wide Web software in the public domain and made the source code available on a royalty-free basis, so that the Web would act as an open standard. The move had an immediate effect: by late 1993 there were more than 500 known web servers, and the Web accounted for 1 percent of Internet traffic. In October 1994 Berners-Lee founded the World Wide Web Consortium at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in collaboration with CERN. The Web became the leading information service of the Internet.
