Tim Berners-Lee and the Invention of the World Wide Web at CERN
In 1989 a physicist at CERN proposed a system of linked documents. Learn how Tim Berners-Lee created HTTP, HTML and the first browser, and gave the web away.
People often use the words "internet" and "web" as if they were the same thing. They are not. The internet is the global network of networks, and it and its ARPANET predecessor existed for about two decades before the World Wide Web. The web is a system of linked documents that runs on top of the internet, and it was proposed in March 1989 by Tim Berners-Lee, a British software engineer working at CERN, the European particle physics laboratory near Geneva.
The problem at CERN
CERN hosted thousands of researchers who used many different kinds of computers and software. Information was scattered across systems, and people came and went, taking knowledge with them. Berners-Lee had earlier written a personal program called ENQUIRE, which stored notes as linked nodes. In 1989 he wrote a document titled "Information Management: A Proposal" that described a larger linked system for the lab. His manager did not reject it, and Berners-Lee was allowed to carry on exploring. In 1990 the proposal was restated with the help of Robert Cailliau, a CERN systems engineer who became a key collaborator.
Three technologies that define the web
Berners-Lee created the original versions of three building blocks, all still in use:
- URL (originally URI): a standard way to address any document on the network.
- HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol): a simple protocol for requesting and sending documents.
- HTML (Hypertext Markup Language): a format for writing documents with links.
He built these on a NeXT computer, the workstation made by Steve Jobs's company NeXT. In late 1990 he wrote the first web browser, called WorldWideWeb (later renamed Nexus, to avoid confusion with the web itself), which could both display and edit pages, and the first web server software. A simpler line-mode browser, written at CERN by the student Nicola Pellow, followed in 1991; it could run on almost any terminal and helped the web reach other computers.
Why it was different from other systems
Hypertext was not a new idea. Vannevar Bush had described a similar concept in 1945, and Ted Nelson and Douglas Engelbart had worked on hypertext systems in the 1960s. Other information systems were appearing on the internet at the same time, including Gopher, which was released at the University of Minnesota in 1991. What set the web apart was a combination of simplicity and openness:
- Anyone could run a server and publish pages without asking for permission.
- Links could point to any page anywhere, with no central registry.
- The formats were simple enough that anyone could write a page by hand.
The price of this openness was that links can break, a flaw Berners-Lee accepted on purpose because a system that required two-way links would have been much harder to grow.
Going public
Berners-Lee announced the project to the public on Usenet newsgroups in August 1991, and early servers appeared at other physics labs. The decisive step came on 30 April 1993, when CERN published a statement placing the web software in the public domain. That removed any doubt about licence fees. By contrast, Gopher's University of Minnesota had announced plans to charge for some uses in 1993, which pushed developers toward the web.
In October 1994 Berners-Lee founded the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, to develop open standards for the web. The W3C still publishes specifications for HTML and related technologies.
What came next
| Year | Milestone |
|---|---|
| 1991 | Web announced publicly |
| 1993 | Software released into the public domain; Mosaic browser appears |
| 1994 | W3C founded |
| 1995 | Commercial web takes off, with Netscape's IPO |
Berners-Lee was knighted in 2004 and received the Turing Award in 2016.
The web is not the only thing on the internet
It is easy to forget that the web was one of several services competing for attention in the early 1990s. Email, Usenet newsgroups, FTP, Gopher and Telnet were all in widespread use. The web eventually absorbed many of them, because a browser could show text, images and forms in a single window and could follow links to any other service. Email still runs as a separate service, with its own protocols and servers, and so do many others. That is why your hosting plan may include web space, databases and mailboxes as separate parts, even though to visitors it all appears as one site. The hosting overview explains how those parts fit together.
It also explains why web standards are developed in the open. The same documents that Berners-Lee's first team wrote by hand are now maintained by many contributors, and the principle that a page should work in any browser comes straight from those early days.
Why this still matters for your website
The web's founding decisions explain how it behaves today. Your site is a document at a URL, delivered over HTTP by a server you or your host runs. Anyone can link to you, and you can link to anyone. This is why a stable address and a reliable server matter so much: every link to your site is only as good as your site's availability. When you choose a home for your pages, our shared hosting is an affordable place to start, and you can move to a larger plan as you grow.
