1990: Tim Berners-Lee invents the Web

In 1989, CERN scientist Tim Berners-Lee wrote a proposal to develop a distributed information system for the Laboratory. “Vague, but exciting” was the comment that his boss wrote on the cover, and with those words, gave the green light to an information revolution.

Conceived and developed to meet the demand for information sharing between scientists all over the world, the Web has changed the way we live.

By Christmas 1990, Berners-Lee had defined the Web’s basic concepts, the URL, http and html, and he had written the first browser and server software. The Web was up and running.

The Web extends

In 1991, an early Web system was released to the particle physics community. Slowly but surely the Web began to spread through the academic world as a wide range of universities and research laboratories started to use it. The first web server in the United States came on-line in December 1991 at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) in California. In 1993, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois released its Mosaic browsers,  which were easy to run and install on ordinary PCs and Macintosh computers. The steady trickle of new Web sites soon became a flood. 1994 became the year of the Web. The world’s First International World-Wide Web conference was held at CERN in May and was hailed as the ‘Woodstock of the Web’.

Open to all

By the end of 1994, the Web had 10 000 servers, of which 2000 were commercial, and 10 million users. Traffic was equivalent to shipping the collected works of Shakespeare every second. CERN issued a statement putting the Web into the public domain, thereby ensuring that it would remain an open standard, and Berners-Lee moved to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), from where he runs the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).