The History of the World Wide Web: From CERN to Everywhere

Almost every business has a website today, and most of us use the web so often that it feels like a utility, like electricity or running water. Yet the web is younger than many of the people who use it. It began as one scientist's plan to help researchers share documents, and it only reached the general public in the early 1990s.

Knowing where the web came from is more than trivia. Links, web addresses and the basic language pages are written in were all designed in the web's first few years. Some of the most important early decisions were not technical at all. They were about keeping the web open and free for anyone to build on.

Here is the story, from a proposal written at a physics laboratory in Switzerland to the global web we know now.

The Internet Came First

People often use "the internet" and "the web" as if they mean the same thing, but they are different. The internet is the worldwide network of connected computers, plus the cables, wireless links and shared rules that let them exchange data. It had been growing for years before the web existed, carrying email, file transfers and discussion groups.

The World Wide Web is one service that runs on top of the internet. It is a system of pages that link to one another, which you view with a program called a browser. If the internet is the road network, the web is one very popular kind of traffic traveling on it.

A Proposal at CERN

In March 1989, Tim Berners-Lee, a British scientist working at CERN, the European particle physics laboratory near Geneva, wrote a document titled "Information Management: A Proposal." CERN served a huge international community of scientists, and keeping track of their documents and computers was a genuine headache. Berners-Lee suggested a system of linked documents, known as hypertext, that people could browse across many different computers.

He refined the idea with a CERN colleague, the Belgian systems engineer Robert Cailliau, and in November 1990 it was formalized as a management proposal. That document described a "hypertext project" called "WorldWideWeb," in which a web of hypertext documents could be viewed by "browsers." The name stuck.

The First Website and the First Browser

By the end of 1990, Berners-Lee had the first web server and the first browser running at CERN. Along the way he created the three building blocks that still sit underneath every website:

• HTML, the language used to write web pages
• HTTP, the set of rules that browsers and servers use to request and send pages
• URLs, the addresses that tell a browser exactly where to find a page

The first web server was a NeXT computer kept in his office. According to CERN, it carried a handwritten label warning colleagues not to switch it off. The world's first website lived at the address info.cern.ch, and it was about the World Wide Web project itself: what hypertext was, how to set up your own web server, and links to other servers as they appeared.

That first browser was also an editor, so you could change pages as well as read them. But it only ran on NeXT computers, which few people owned. So Nicola Pellow, a student on a work placement at CERN, wrote a simpler "line-mode" browser that could run on almost any system. In 1991 the software was released more widely, and in August 1991 Berners-Lee announced it on internet newsgroups, which is how interest began to spread far beyond CERN. In December 1991 the first web server in the United States came online at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) in California.

April 30, 1993: The Web Is Given Away

One of the most important moments in the web's history was a legal one. On April 30, 1993, CERN put the World Wide Web software in the public domain, making it free for anyone to use and improve. CERN then released the next version under an open license, which it describes as a surer way of spreading the software as widely as possible.

The effect was enormous. Nobody had to pay a fee or ask permission to run a web server, build a browser or publish a page. Universities, hobbyists and, soon, businesses could all build on the same free foundation, and that is a big part of why the web grew so quickly.

Mosaic and the Year of the Web

Early in 1993, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois released the first version of its Mosaic browser, built by a team that included Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina. NCSA describes Mosaic as the first published browser that automatically displayed pictures along with text, much like the pages of a magazine. It also offered friendly touches such as back, forward and home buttons, and bookmarks.

Mosaic first ran on the Unix workstations popular in research labs, but NCSA soon released versions for ordinary Windows PCs and Macintosh computers. Suddenly the web was something non-specialists could enjoy. According to CERN, by late 1993 there were more than 500 known web servers, and the web accounted for about 1 percent of all internet traffic.

CERN calls 1994 the "Year of the Web." The first International World Wide Web Conference was held at CERN in May, and a second, much larger one followed in the United States in October. That same year Berners-Lee left CERN for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he founded the World Wide Web Consortium, or W3C, in October 1994 to develop common standards for the web. By the end of 1994, CERN reports, there were about 10,000 web servers, around 2,000 of them commercial, and roughly 10 million users.

From there, growth was explosive, as commercial browsers arrived and businesses rushed to get online.

A Short Timeline

• March 1989: Tim Berners-Lee writes "Information Management: A Proposal" at CERN.
• November 1990: Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau formalise the WorldWideWeb proposal.
• End of 1990: The first web server and browser are running at CERN.
• August 1991: The web software is announced on internet newsgroups.
• December 1991: The first US web server comes online at SLAC.
• Early 1993: NCSA releases the first version of the Mosaic browser.
• April 30, 1993: CERN puts the web software in the public domain.
• October 1994: Berners-Lee founds the W3C at MIT.

What This Means for Your Website Today

A website built today still rests on the same three ideas from 1990: pages written in HTML, delivered over HTTP, and found at a URL. The modern versions are far more capable, but the basic model has survived for more than three decades.

The web's openness also explains why you can choose from so many hosting companies, website builders and browsers, and why a site built with one set of tools can be read on almost any device. That openness depends on shared standards, which is why organisations like the W3C still matter. And links, the heart of Berners-Lee's original idea, remain central: they are how visitors move around your site and how search engines discover your pages in the first place.

Key takeaways

• The web is a service that runs on the internet; Tim Berners-Lee first proposed it at CERN in March 1989.
• HTML, HTTP and URLs, created by the end of 1990, are still the foundation of every website.
• CERN's decision to put the web software in the public domain on April 30, 1993 let anyone build on it without fees.
• NCSA's Mosaic browser, released in 1993, made the web visual and easy enough for the general public.
• Today's websites still benefit from the open, standards-based design of the early web.

Sources

• CERN, A short history of the Web
• CERN, The birth of the Web
• Tim Berners-Lee, Information Management: A Proposal (W3C archive)
• W3C, A Little History of the World Wide Web
• NCSA, NCSA Mosaic
• W3C, History of W3C