Invention of the World Wide Web (1989) by Tim Berners-Lee

The World Wide Web was invented by Tim Berners-Lee, a British computer scientist at CERN, the European particle physics laboratory near Geneva. He set out the idea in a proposal in March 1989, and by the end of 1990 he had built the first web server, browser and website. CERN’s decision in 1993 to release the technology royalty-free allowed the Web to grow into the global information system used by billions of people.

Background: an information problem at CERN

CERN in the 1980s employed thousands of scientists and engineers from dozens of countries, working on different computers with incompatible systems. Information about projects, people and software was scattered and often lost when staff moved on.

Berners-Lee, born in London in 1955 and a physics graduate of Oxford, first worked at CERN as a contractor in 1980. There he wrote a program called ENQUIRE to keep track of people and projects through linked notes. He returned to CERN in 1984 to work on data acquisition and control systems, and became convinced that a more general system of linked information was needed.

He was building on earlier ideas. In 1945 the American engineer Vannevar Bush had described an imaginary desk-like machine, the memex, for following trails of linked documents. In the 1960s Ted Nelson coined the word “hypertext”, and Douglas Engelbart demonstrated linked documents on screen. Meanwhile the internet, which had grown out of ARPANET, was connecting research institutions around the world, and CERN joined it in the late 1980s.

The 1989 proposal

In March 1989 Berners-Lee wrote “Information Management: A Proposal”. It described a system of documents connected by hypertext links that could run across different kinds of computers and grow without central control. His supervisor, Mike Sendall, famously wrote “vague but exciting” on the cover and allowed him to work on it alongside his main job.

In 1990 Berners-Lee was joined by Robert Cailliau, a Belgian engineer at CERN, and in November 1990 the two produced a revised proposal for a “WorldWideWeb” hypertext project. Berners-Lee had chosen the name after rejecting alternatives such as “Information Mesh”.

The proposal and the first web

Working on a NeXT computer, a powerful workstation designed by Steve Jobs’s company NeXT, Berners-Lee wrote the foundations of the Web in the autumn of 1990. He defined three basic technologies that are still in use:

• HTML (HyperText Markup Language): a simple way to write documents containing headings, text and links.
• HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol): the rules by which a browser requests a page and a server sends it.
• URL (Uniform Resource Locator): a unique address for every document, originally called a Universal Document Identifier.

He also wrote the first server software and the first browser, called WorldWideWeb and later renamed Nexus, which could both display and edit pages. By late December 1990 the first web pages were being served at CERN from the NeXT machine, which carried a handwritten label warning colleagues not to switch it off.

Because few people had NeXT computers, a CERN student, Nicola Pellow, wrote a simple “line-mode” browser that worked on almost any terminal. This made the Web accessible to a much wider range of users in 1991.

Going public

The first website, at the address info.cern.ch, explained the project itself: what the Web was, how to obtain a browser and how to set up a server. On 6 August 1991 Berners-Lee posted a summary of the project to the alt.hypertext newsgroup, inviting anyone on the internet to try it.

Physics laboratories were among the first adopters. In December 1991 the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) in California set up the first web server in the United States, giving physicists access to its database of research papers. Other universities followed, and volunteers began writing browsers for different computer systems.

How the Web worked

When a user clicked a link, the browser read the address in the URL, contacted the computer named in it over the internet and asked for the page using HTTP. The server sent back a file written in HTML, which the browser then laid out on the screen. The same basic exchange still happens billions of times a day.

The design was deliberately decentralised. Anyone could run a server and publish pages without asking permission or registering them in a central index, and a link could point to any document on any server. Links worked in one direction only, so if a page was moved or deleted, links to it simply broke.

Earlier hypertext systems had avoided this problem by keeping everything inside one program or one computer, as Apple’s HyperCard did, or by insisting on links that worked both ways, as in Ted Nelson’s long-planned Xanadu project. Berners-Lee accepted broken links as the price of a system that could grow without limit. That trade-off is often credited with allowing the Web to scale from one machine at CERN to the whole world.

Berners-Lee also intended the Web to be a space for writing as well as reading. His first browser let users edit pages directly, an idea that later browsers largely dropped but which returned in wikis, blogs and other collaborative tools.

The royalty-free decision

As interest grew, the question arose of who owned the Web. In 1993 the University of Minnesota announced that it might charge licence fees for some uses of Gopher, a rival system for finding information on the internet, which worried many developers.

On 30 April 1993 CERN issued a statement placing the World Wide Web software in the public domain, so that anyone could use, copy and modify it free of charge. Berners-Lee had pressed for this, arguing that a universal system could only succeed if it was open to all. The decision is widely seen as one of the main reasons the Web, rather than a proprietary system, became the standard.

Mosaic and explosive growth

In 1993 the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois released Mosaic, a browser developed by Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina. It displayed images alongside text and was easy to install on ordinary personal computers running Windows and Macintosh systems, as well as Unix workstations.

Mosaic set off rapid growth. The number of websites rose from a few hundred in 1993 to thousands in 1994 and, by most estimates, more than a million by 1997. Commercial browsers such as Netscape Navigator, launched in 1994, and Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, launched in 1995, brought the Web to homes and offices, helped by cheaper personal computers and dial-up internet access.

Key people

• Tim Berners-Lee: inventor of the Web, later founder and director of the World Wide Web Consortium.
• Robert Cailliau: CERN engineer who co-authored the 1990 proposal and championed the project.
• Mike Sendall: Berners-Lee’s supervisor, who allowed the project to go ahead.
• Nicola Pellow: student who wrote the line-mode browser in 1990-1991.

Consequences and legacy

In October 1994 Berners-Lee founded the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, with support from the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and the European Commission and in collaboration with CERN, to develop common standards so that the Web would not split into incompatible versions. The first international World Wide Web conference was held at CERN in May 1994.

Within little more than a decade the Web transformed publishing, commerce, education, politics and personal communication. It became the main platform for search engines, online shopping, social networks and, later, smartphones’ access to information.

Legacy

Berners-Lee was knighted in 2004 and received the Turing Award, often called the Nobel Prize of computing, for 2016. At the opening ceremony of the London 2012 Olympic Games he appeared at a NeXT computer, while the words “This is for everyone” were displayed around the stadium.

CERN restored the first website at its original address in 2013 as a historical record. Berners-Lee has continued to campaign for an open Web, raising concerns about privacy, misinformation and the power of large companies.

Myths and facts

• Myth: the Web and the internet are the same thing. The internet is the network; the Web is one service that runs on it, alongside email and other protocols.
• Myth: the Web was invented in the United States. It was created in Europe, at CERN, an intergovernmental laboratory straddling the Swiss-French border.
• Myth: Berners-Lee patented the Web. He and CERN deliberately chose not to charge royalties for the core technology.

Timeline

• 1980: Berners-Lee writes the ENQUIRE program during a contract at CERN.
• 1989, March: He submits “Information Management: A Proposal”.
• 1990, November: Berners-Lee and Cailliau present a revised WorldWideWeb proposal.
• 1990, December: The first web server and browser are running at CERN.
• 1991, 6 August: Berners-Lee announces the Web on the alt.hypertext newsgroup.
• 1991, December: SLAC sets up the first web server in the United States.
• 1993, 30 April: CERN releases the Web software into the public domain.
• 1993: NCSA releases the Mosaic browser.
• 1994, October: The World Wide Web Consortium is founded.

Why it matters

The World Wide Web turned the internet from a tool for specialists into a medium for everyone. Its open, royalty-free design, chosen deliberately in 1993, made it possible for anyone to publish and link information, shaping the economy and culture of the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries.