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Portrait of The World Wide Web

General knowledge · Inventions & discoveries

The World Wide Web

1989–1993

Invention — computing

In March 1989 Tim Berners-Lee, a British software engineer at CERN, wrote a document called "Information Management: A Proposal", suggesting a hypertext system to link the laboratory's scattered documents. His manager Mike Sendall scrawled "Vague but exciting" on the cover and let him try it on a NeXT computer; by the end of 1990 the first server, browser and page were running. CERN put the software into the public domain on 30 April 1993, a decision that let the system spread without licence fees and turned an internal fix for physicists into the world's information layer.

How to spot them

  • ▸CERN, 1989; a proposal annotated 'Vague but exciting'; a black NeXT cube as the first server
  • ▸info.cern.ch; URLs, HTTP and HTML; a browser-editor first called WorldWideWeb, later renamed Nexus
  • ▸Public domain on 30 April 1993; the W3C founded in 1994
  • ▸Not the same thing as the internet: one is a way of linking documents, the other is the network underneath

Key facts

'Information Management: A Proposal', March 1989 (1989)

Its author's manager, Mike Sendall, wrote 'Vague but exciting' on the cover

info.cern.ch, running on a black NeXT cube (1990)

The first server, carrying a hand-written sticker warning colleagues not to power it down

Rejected names included 'Information Mesh' and 'The Information Mine'

The second was dropped partly because its initials spelled its inventor's own

CERN placed the software in the public domain on 30 April 1993 (1993)

No royalties and no licence: the decision that let it spread faster than rivals such as Gopher

Its inventor typed 'This is for everyone' at the London 2012 opening ceremony (2012)

Sitting at a NeXT machine in the middle of the Olympic Stadium

Three acronyms it introduced: the address, the protocol and the markup

URL, HTTP and HTML

Its first browser was also an editor, and was renamed to avoid confusion (1990)

WorldWideWeb became Nexus, so the program would not be confused with the system

Key ideas

  • Three simple pieces make it work: a universal address for any document (the URL), a request-and-response protocol for fetching it (HTTP), and a markup language for writing it with links (HTML)
  • Links are one-way and may break; that was a deliberate choice, because demanding two-way integrity would have made a global system impossible to grow

Quick-fire facts

  • •Tim Berners-Lee was born in London in 1955; both his parents worked on the Ferranti Mark 1
  • •Robert Cailliau, a Belgian engineer, co-authored the November 1990 proposal and championed the project inside CERN
  • •The first web page address was http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html
  • •The Mosaic browser, released in 1993 by Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina at NCSA, popularised inline images and led to Netscape
  • •Berners-Lee founded the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) at MIT in 1994
  • •He was knighted in 2004 and received the ACM Turing Award for 2016
  • •The internet long predates the web: ARPANET began in 1969 and TCP/IP was adopted across it in 1983
  • •The original work was done on a NeXT machine, the computer Steve Jobs built after leaving Apple
  • •Berners-Lee's later projects include Solid, aimed at returning personal data to individual control

Drill it — 10 cards

1 / 10new card

Sources