🕸️ The World Wide Web Begins!
1989 to 1991 — One Scientist's Idea Turns the Internet into a Web of Pages 📄🔗
Geneva, Switzerland
"WorldWideWeb"
In March 1989, Tim Berners-Lee gave his boss a plan for linking information together. His boss wrote three words on the cover: "Vague, but exciting."
📋 What Really Happened
Tim Berners-Lee, a British scientist at the CERN physics lab, wanted an easy way for scientists to share their notes.
By the end of 1990 he had built three tools that are still used today: HTML to write pages, URLs to give each page an address, and HTTP to send pages between computers.
The first web server was his own NeXT computer. A handwritten label on it said: "This machine is a server. DO NOT POWER IT DOWN!!"
His coworker Robert Cailliau helped rewrite the plan and get the project started.
The Web is not the same as the Internet. The Internet is the network of connected computers. The Web is the pages and links that travel over it.
🧭 From Idea to Everyone
- March 1989 Berners-Lee writes his plan, "Information Management: A Proposal."
- Late 1990 The first browser, the first server, and the first web page are working at CERN.
- August 6, 1991 He tells the public about the project in an online discussion group, and people outside CERN start to use it.
- December 1991 The first web server in the United States starts up at a physics lab in California.
- 1993 CERN makes the Web free for everyone on April 30. A new browser named Mosaic shows pictures on the page, and the Web takes off.