https://www.history.com/
The Worldâs First Web Site
Elizabeth NixAug 30, 2018
The son of computer scientists, Berners-Lee was born in London in 1955 (the
same year as Steve Jobs and Bill Gates) and studied physics at Oxford. While
employed at CERN in the 1980s, Berners-Lee observed how tough it was to keep
track of the projects and computer systems of the organizationâs thousands of
researchers, who were spread around the globe. As he later stated: âIn those
days, there was different information on different computers, but you had to
log on to different computers to get at it. Also, sometimes you had to learn a
different program on each computer.â
This computer was used at CERN by British scientist Tim Berners-Lee to devise
the World Wide Web (WWW). (Credit: SSPL/Getty Images)
In March 1989, Berners-Lee gave managers at CERN a proposal for an information
management system that used hypertext to link documents on different computers
that were connected to the Internet. (Hypertext, a term coined in 1963, allows
a person to get a document or piece of content by clicking on a coded word or
phrase.) Labelled âvague but excitingâ by his boss, the proposal at first
wasnât accepted. Berners-Lee teamed up with Robert Cailliau, a Belgian
engineer at CERN, to refine the proposal, and in 1990 the Englishmanâs boss
gave him time to work on the project. After originally calling the project
Information Management, Berners-Lee tried out names such as Mine of Information
and Information Mesh before settling on WorldWideWeb.
By the end of 1990, Berners-Lee, using a Steve Jobs-designed NeXT computer, had
developed the key technologies that are the bedrock of the Web, including
Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), for creating Web pages; Hypertext Transfer
Protocol (HTTP), a set of rules for transferring data across the Web; and
Uniform Resource Locators (URLs), or Web addresses for finding a document or
page. He also had devised a basic browser and Web server software.
The beginning of the Web as a publicly available service on the Internet
arrived on August 6, 1991, when Berners-Lee published the first-ever website.
Fittingly, the site was about the World Wide Web project, describing the Web
and how to use it. Hosted at CERN on Berners-Leeâs NeXT computer, the
siteâs URL was http://info.cern.ch.
Tim Berners-Lee, Inventor of the Web, poses in front of the first World Wide
Web Server. (Credit: SEBASTIAN DERUNGS/AFP/Getty Images)
Berners-Lee didnât try to cash in on his invention and rejected CERNâs call
to patent his Web technology. He wanted the Web to be open and free so it could
expand and evolve as rapidly as possible. As he later said, âHad the
technology been proprietary, and in my total control, it would probably not
have taken off. You canât propose that something be a universal space and at
the same time keep control of it.â
In 1993, a team at the University of Illinoisâ National Center for
Supercomputing Applications released Mosaic, the first Web browser to become
popular with the general public. The next few years saw the launch of such
websites as Yahoo (1994), Amazon (1995), eBay (1995) and Google (1998). By the
time Facebook debuted in 2004, there were more than 51 million websites,
according to Internet Live Stats.
Meanwhile, in 1994, Berners-Lee left CERN for the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, where he founded the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), an
organization that maintains standards for the Web. The low-profile visionary
went on to be named one of Time Magazineâs 100 Most Important People of the
20th Century, and in 2004 was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II. In 2009,
Berners-Lee started the World Wide Web Foundation, an organization focused on
ensuring the Web benefits humanity. During the opening ceremony at the 2012
Summer Olympics in London, he was honored for inventing the Web and tweeted,
âThis is for everyone.â
Sent from my iPhone
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