THE WORLD ATLAS

Technology · 1989–1991

The World Wide Web

CERN, near Geneva (Switzerland)

In March 1989 Tim Berners-Lee, an English computer scientist at the CERN physics laboratory, proposed a decentralised hypertext system for sharing information. By the end of 1990 he had a working browser, WorldWideWeb, and the first web server; the Web was released to other research institutions in January 1991 and to the whole Internet in August 1991, and on 30 April 1993 CERN made its protocols and code available royalty-free.

See it on the map

The NeXT computer Tim Berners-Lee used at CERN as the first web server, with its “do not power down” label (photographed in 2005)
The NeXT computer Tim Berners-Lee used at CERN as the first web server, with its “do not power down” label (photographed in 2005) Coolcaesar (Wikimedia Commons) · CC BY-SA 3.0

Why it mattered

After the Mosaic browser appeared later in 1993, thousands of websites sprang up within a year, setting off the Web's explosive growth into a global information system.

Related

Sources