World Wide Web history

By Michael Fraase

Tuesday, 16 January 1996 10:38AM CST

Section: Internet

Tim Berners-Lee, the World Wide Web’s main architect reportedly claims to have come to the notion of hypertext independently of everything that came before. While such a claim is highly suspect, it doesn’t detract from his designing the first online platform-independent hypertext system to gain widespread acceptance. Berners-Lee began work on a personal hypertext tool in the early 1980s. By the late 1980s, Berners-Lee, then at CERN (the European Particle Physics Institute in Geneva, Switzerland), began to explore a hypertext system that would help the world-wide high-energy physics community share information. In March 1989, Berners-Lee offered a proposal for an online hypertext system to meet his community’s needs.

Robert Cailliau collaborated with Berners-Lee to co-author a design specification for the online hypertext system in November 1990. Cailliau and Berners-Lee envisioned their version of hypertext as a networked web of information nodes. Associative links could be established across machine boundaries, and a simple protocol for exchanging hypertext documents was included in the specification (this grew to be HTTP). Hypertext documents would be comprised of a single document protocol (embodied as HTML). Perhaps most importantly, the original design specification called for widely available “browser” programs used to traverse this web of information nodes. By late 1990, Berners-Lee had a prototype up and running on a NeXT and Nicola Pellow had both line-mode and NeXT browsers available by Christmas 1990. In May 1991, the World Wide Web was initially released for use within CERN. By August 1991, CERN announced it was working on a complete tool set.

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