Where the web was born

Tim Berners-Lee, a scientist at CERN, invented the World Wide Web (WWW) in 1989. The Web was originally conceived and developed to meet the demand for automatic information sharing between scientists working in different universities and institutes all over the world.

CERN is not an isolated laboratory, but rather a focus for an extensive community that now includes about 60 countries and about 8000 scientists. Although these scientists typically spend some time on the CERN site, they usually work at universities and national laboratories in their home countries. Good contact is clearly essential.

The basic idea of the WWW was to merge the technologies of personal computers, computer networking and hypertext into a powerful and easy to use global information system.