The Origins of the World Wide Web

The World Wide Web, or the web as it’s more commonly called, has evolved over time into what it is today, but it all started with one man and one idea. Sir Tim Berners-Lee invented the internet in 1989 when he was still an engineer at CERN in Switzerland, and he developed the first website in 1990 to help him share information about his new project with his colleagues.

Tim Berners-Lee, the Father of the Web

The world wide web (often abbreviated as WWW or W3) is a global information medium and system. It presents human knowledge in a hypertextual, nonlinear format; it was invented by Tim Berners-Lee while he was working at CERN in Switzerland. He made his proposal publically available on 12 November 1993 with his technical paper Information Management: A Proposal. The first line that he published read Uniform Resource Locators (URLs), naming conventions for locating files in computer systems all over the world, are described. This publication was followed by another entitled Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), HTTP/1.0, dated 19 May 1994.

Step Back in Time - The Enquire Within Upon Everything Bookstore

The Enquire Within Upon Everything is one of those shops that sells items in bulk. In fact, if you go there and buy something, it’s likely that you’ll be in for a surprise as to what you bought. The store is filled with goodies such as candies, toys and much more. The reason behind it all? Well, according to their signage, it’s simply because they love giving out surprises!

1989 – Tim Berners-Lee's Proposal

After experimenting with a NeXT computer at CERN, Berners-Lee writes his first proposal for a Hypertext project, as he called it. In it, he laid out an ambitious plan for a system that would change people's lives by providing easy access to shared information across different computers. He coined it Hypertext Transfer Protocol, or HTTP. It would be almost five years before his invention took off (and even then, few outside of academia were using it). Still, in March 1989, he circulated his proposal and met with Eric Bina and Mike Sendall at CERN to hammer out what would eventually become HTML.

1989 – The Birth of HTML

Tim Berners-Lee was hired to work as a software engineer at CERN. Berners-Lee wanted to create a way for physicists and researchers around the world to share data and ideas more easily. He created HTML (HyperText Markup Language), which is basically an instruction set for displaying text on computer screens and embedded within documents, among other things. In its simplest form, you can think of HTML as an instruction set that tells a browser how to render text on screen or in print.

1990 – Founding of CERN

In March 1989, Tim Berners-Lee proposed a distributed information system, which he named WorldWideWeb. He wrote a proposal in 1990 and CERN started development in April of that year. On October 15, 1991, CERN announced it to their community with a line on their homepage: This is for real!. It was originally known as ENQUIRE (Expanded Network Question-Answering System), but was renamed by Berners-Lee in 1994. The first version has not survived; however many versions exist from February 9 to August 30.

1993 – First Website

The world’s first website was created by Tim Berners-Lee, a British scientist at CERN (Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire) in Switzerland. The site, hosted on a NeXT computer, was a demonstration for how hypertext could be used to share information and links online. The very first page was just an explanation of what HTTP and HTML were. But it did offer some kind words: This is for everyone, it read. Welcome to the Information Age. From its very first line, then, there was something inclusive about that first website—something that perfectly captured what would ultimately make HTML and its successor technologies so powerful.

1994 – Mosaic Netscape Browser Launched

The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) created a browser called Mosaic in 1994. It was originally developed as a program to help scientists share research documents, but became widely known when it was launched by Netscape Communications in October 1994. As more and more users began using Mosaic, its developers decided to separate elements into browser software and server software. In 1995, NCSA released a browser called Lynx that only used existing web page text without graphics, while a European company called INRIA created Cello with functionality similar to Mosaic and Lynx; these were precursors to Netscape Navigator.

1995 – First Site with .com Domain Registered

The first website in history was hosted by computer science student, Tim Berners-Lee, at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland. It wasn’t very flashy it was just a website consisting of an index page with information about himself and his mentor. He also created an online link to documentation for software he was working on called Enquire Within Upon Everything (as well as notes on physics). After establishing that site, he then set up a server with new software called WorldWideWeb (the very first name of what we now know as today’s internet) and then connected his personal Unix computer to it using TCP/IP. Thus allowing him to remotely access data from anywhere in the world. All on August 6th, 1992!

1998 – Adobe Systems Acquires Spyglass Inc. Section: 1999–2014

The Humble Beginning: Marc Andreesen Leaves Netscape and Forms Loudcloud with Jim Barksdale, Gary Little, and Mike McCue. Section: Mark Zuckerberg Hires Friendster Founder Chris Hughes to Hack into Harvard’s Social Network. Section: Google Code Makes Public its First Open Source Project—the Android SDK. Section: The Internet Archive Starts a Kickstarter to Save Millions of Books from Extinction. Section: On Twitter, news organizations start to send out breaking news alerts and promote stories by marking them with hashtags such as #news or #breakingnews; politicians also use Twitter as a way to reach out directly to citizens for their opinions on current events (cf.
1996 – Google Launches Section: 1997 – Yahoo, Amazon and Ebay Launched
1998 – Social Media and SEO Section: 1999 – Google IPO: 2000 – Wikipedia Launched: 2001 – Social Media Section: 2003 – Twitter Launched: 2004 - Facebook Launched Section: 2009 – Snapchat launched as Picaboo, a picture sharing application for cell phones.