The World Wide Web

Although the internet – an interconnected network of computers – came out of the US military, the graphical World Wide Web, which we access through our web browsers, was created by English scientist and inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee. Working at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) in 1980, he built a system called ENQUIRE, which was a personal database of people and software models. Each page in ENQUIRE was linked to another page via hypertext. In 1984, he wrote a proposal for “a large hypertext database with typed links”, which generated little interest. Undeterred, he came up with the World Wide Web, developing HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP), HyperText Markup Language (HTML) the first web browser, the first web server and web server software, and the first web pages. On 6th August 1991, he posted a short summary of the World Wide Web project online, and the web was officially made public. The rest, as they say, is history.