The Internet and the Web are not the same thing. The Internet is the network of networks that carries data, born in the 1970s and 1980s. The World Wide Web is a system of linked documents that runs on top of the Internet, and it was invented later, at the end of the 1980s, at CERN in Geneva, the European laboratory for particle physics. Its inventor is the British physicist and computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee.
The information problem at CERN
CERN was, and is, a place where thousands of researchers from many countries work on shared experiments, with different computers, different operating systems and documentation scattered everywhere. People come and go, projects change, and finding a piece of information, such as who wrote a certain program or where the documentation for a piece of equipment was, was often difficult.
Berners-Lee had already worked on this problem in the early 1980s, during an earlier stint at CERN, with a program called ENQUIRE, which allowed pages linked to one another to be created. It was, however, a local system, not designed for a network.
The 1989 proposal
In March 1989 Berners-Lee wrote a document entitled Information Management: A Proposal. He proposed a distributed hypertext system: documents stored on different computers, linked by references that made it possible to move from one to another regardless of where they were.
His manager, Mike Sendall, wrote a now-famous comment on the cover: "vague but exciting". It was not a formal approval, but it gave him the chance to work on it. In 1990 Berners-Lee reworked the proposal together with his Belgian colleague Robert Cailliau, who became the project's main champion within CERN.
The three pillars
By the end of 1990, working on a NeXT computer, Berners-Lee had built all the fundamental elements of the Web:
| Element | Function |
|---|---|
| HTML | The language for writing pages, with headings, paragraphs and links |
| HTTP | The protocol by which a client requests a page and the server sends it |
| URL | The unique address that identifies each resource on the network |
To these were added the first web server and the first browser, called WorldWideWeb, which also allowed pages to be edited, not just read.
An example of early HTML
Early HTML was very simple. A page could look like this:
<title>Sample project</title>
<h1>Documentation</h1>
<p>The installation instructions are
<a href="install.html">on this page</a>.
The <a href> tag, the link, is the heart of the whole system: a reference that anyone can create to any document, without asking anyone's permission.
The decisive choices
Compared with other hypertext systems of the time, the Web made a few choices that explain its success:
- One-way links. A link does not require the cooperation of the target document. This makes the system simple and scalable, at the price of broken links.
- No central control. Anyone can set up a server and publish.
- Compatibility with existing systems. URLs could also point to resources reachable through earlier protocols, such as FTP.
The first website
The first website was published at CERN, at the address info.cern.ch, and explained what the project was and how to set up your own server. In August 1991 Berners-Lee publicly announced the project in an Internet discussion group devoted to hypertext, inviting anyone to try it.
To make the Web accessible to people without a NeXT computer, a simple text-based browser that worked on any terminal was developed at CERN.
30 April 1993
A fundamental date is 30 April 1993, when CERN issued a document placing the Web software in the public domain. Anyone could use it, modify it and build on it without paying royalties. Other networked information systems of the time were subject to possible licensing fees, and this difference helped steer developers and institutions towards the Web.
Mosaic and the spread of the Web
In 1993, at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications in the United States, Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina developed Mosaic, a graphical browser that was easy to install on Windows, Macintosh and Unix and displayed images directly inside pages. Mosaic made the Web accessible to a much wider public. Andreessen then founded Netscape, whose browser dominated the market in the second half of the 1990s.
In 1994 Berners-Lee founded the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the organisation that has developed Web standards ever since.
Why it is worth remembering
Every time you type an address into a browser you are using the three inventions of 1990. The choice not to patent and to make the software free is one of the main reasons the Web became a universal platform rather than one of many proprietary systems.
In short
- The Web is a system of linked documents running on top of the Internet, invented by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN.
- The original proposal dates from March 1989; by the end of 1990 HTML, HTTP, URLs, the first server and the first browser existed.
- The project was publicly announced in August 1991, and on 30 April 1993 CERN placed the software in the public domain.
- The graphical browser Mosaic, in 1993, opened the Web to the general public; the W3C was founded in 1994.
