The Invention of the World Wide Web

When people think of the Web (World Wide Web or WWW), they think of the Internet. If you were to ask ten people if the Internet and the Web are the same thing, I would venture to guess nine or ten of them would say yes. In reality they are not the same thing. The Internet is simply a global network of computers. The Web actually runs of top of the Internet. Because of the Web, we can load graphics, pictures, audio, and video content for others to read and view. Before the Web, we were restricted to reading text.

The World Wide Web was invented by Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau in 1990. In 1989, while working at CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research), both men made proposals for what we know today as links. In 1990 they joined forces and wrote a proposal jointly in which the term "World Wide Web" is used for the first time (originally without spaces). And in late 1990 and early 1991, Tim Berners-Lee wrote the first web browser. That's 20 years after the start of the Internet.

People had been trying to work out effective ways of sending information around using the Internet for quite a few years as the beginnings of the Internet began in the middle 1960's. An improvement came in 1971 with the invention of Email. Before the Web was born, there hadn't been any systems that had harnessed the Net's potential we know today.

The Web changed everything. Berners-Less's big idea was to apply the idea of links to the Internet. He imagined that the Web would be a huge mass of pages that you could move between by clicking on links. He came up with a format for these pages (HTML) and as mentioned above, wrote the first web browser to view them. He also wrote the first web server for sending them to other people's web browsers.

Links might not seem like much now, but at the time they were revolutionary. Remember, all the Internet users had for almost twenty years was text and eMail. Can you even begin to imagine what the Web would be like if instead of clicking a link; you had to keep typing long addresses every time you wished to move from one page to the next. Quite frankly, without the Web, having Internet access would be very useless. Well, maybe not useless, but cumbersome at best.