The World Wide Web

The story

Tim's problem

At CERN, the big European physics laboratory in Geneva, thousands of scientists from many countries were working in 1989, each with their own computer and their own way of keeping documents in order. When a researcher left, information about their work was often lost. A young English computer scientist, Tim Berners-Lee, who had worked there for a few years, wondered how everyone could find and share documents, even if they were stored on different machines.

In March 1989 he wrote a proposal called “Information Management: A Proposal”. His boss, Mike Sendall, read it and famously wrote on the cover: “Vague but exciting”. It was not a refusal: he let Berners-Lee keep working on it. In 1990, with the help of his Belgian colleague Robert Cailliau, Berners-Lee began to build the system.

Three simple inventions

The basic idea was to connect documents to each other with “links”. Click on a word, and another document opens, even on another computer. To make it work, Berners-Lee invented three things, now used everywhere. The first is HTML, a language for writing pages with their titles, texts and links. The second is the URL, the address that identifies each page (“http://…”). The third is HTTP, the rule by which one computer asks another for a page and receives it. He added two programs: the first browser, the program for looking at pages, and the first server, the computer that stores them and sends them to whoever asks.

The first server ran on a dark, cube-shaped computer made by the company NeXT, in Berners-Lee's office. A handwritten label on it said: “This machine is a server. DO NOT POWER IT DOWN!!”. Its address was info.cern.ch, and the first web page explained what the World Wide Web was.

6 August 1991

For a while the Web remained a CERN experiment. On 6 August 1991 Berners-Lee announced the project to Internet users in a discussion group: from then on anyone could connect, read the pages and create a site of their own. The network had existed since 1969, but it was used mostly by a few experts: the Web made it simple, with words to click instead of commands to remember.

In 1993 two important things happened. On 30 April CERN declared that the Web software was in the public domain: nobody had to pay to use it or ask permission. It was a vital decision. And at an American university, in Urbana, Illinois, a group of students, including Marc Andreessen, created Mosaic, the first easy-to-use browser, which also showed images. From it came Netscape and, later, the other browsers we still use today.

In 1994 Berners-Lee founded the W3C at MIT, a consortium that sets the standards of the Web, so that all websites work in any browser. He never patented his invention or made money from it: he always argued that the Web should stay free and open to everyone.

A web of billions of pages

In 1991 you could count the websites on your fingers: the first was CERN's. But the number grew quickly, partly because anyone could create one: by the end of the 1990s there were millions. Today there are billions of pages. The Web and the Internet are not the same thing, though: the Internet is the network of cables and computers that connects the world; the Web is one of the things that run on that network, along with email, online games and phone calls.