World Wide Web Invented
In 1989, Tim Berners-Lee, a British computer scientist working at CERN, the European particle physics laboratory near Geneva, wrote a proposal for a system to manage and share information using linked documents. That idea became the World Wide Web. It matters because it turned the internet, which until then was mostly a tool for researchers and specialists, into something ordinary people could navigate with little technical knowledge, reshaping commerce, media, education, and daily life.
The internet itself was already two decades old. Its roots lay in ARPANET, a US research network of the late 1960s, and by the 1980s many networks were linked through shared protocols such as TCP/IP. But using them required knowing specific commands and where information was stored. At CERN, thousands of scientists came from universities around the world, using different computers and software, and documentation was easily lost as people came and went. Berners-Lee saw this as a problem of organization rather than hardware. He drew on the older idea of hypertext, developed by thinkers such as Vannevar Bush, Ted Nelson, and Douglas Engelbart, in which pieces of text are connected by links.
His March 1989 document, often described as "Information Management: A Proposal," reportedly drew a lukewarm reaction from his supervisor, though he was allowed to continue. In 1990, with colleague Robert Cailliau, he refined the plan and began building the pieces. These included a way to address documents (what became URLs), a protocol for transferring them (HTTP), a markup language for writing pages (HTML), and the first web server and browser, which ran on a NeXT computer. The first website went live at CERN, and by 1991 the software was being made available to outside users.
A key decision came in 1993, when CERN announced that the web technology would be free for anyone to use, without royalties. That year also saw the release of Mosaic, a graphical browser from the University of Illinois that helped popularize the web beyond academia. Browsers such as Netscape Navigator followed, and the late 1990s brought search engines, online shopping, and the dot-com boom.
The web is often confused with the internet, but they are distinct: the internet is the underlying network, while the web is one service running on top of it, alongside email and others. Berners-Lee later founded the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) to guide open standards. Today the web raises debates about privacy, misinformation, and the concentration of power in a few large platforms, concerns Berners-Lee himself has voiced. Its origin, however, remains a notable example of a practical solution to a workplace problem growing into a global infrastructure.