The World Wide Web began in an office at CERN.
In March 1989, Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee proposed a way to link documents together and created what we know today as the Internet. However, it was not until December 20, 1990 that the first webpage was created.
“The Internet” and “the Web” are words that the general public use fairly synonymously, so you might be wondering what the difference is. The Internet is a set of rules that enables computer networks to communicate, whereas the Web uses the network to make it possible for computers to access files and pages hosted on other computers.
Tim Berners-Lee, a scientist at the CERN (Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire, European Organization for Nuclear Research) research facility in Switzerland, launched the first website on his own NeXT computer. He called it the World Wide Web. The machine can still be found at CERN. The research facility recreated the site so you can see it at its original address. It is basically a “self-help” guide to the Web at the time.
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Berners-Lee, who received a knighthood for his work, focused on text to start. The initial proposal states: "Where facilities already exist, we aim to allow graphics interchange, but in this project, we concentrate on the universal readership for text, rather than on graphics."
According to the Pew Research Center’s “The Web at 25” report, Berners-Lee released his code to the world for free in 1990, turning the “Internet from a geeky data-transfer system embraced by specialists and a small number of enthusiasts into a mass-adopted technology.”
Berners-Lee sees the Internet as a powerful means of communication. However, when asked by The Register about what has surprised him about how it has grown, he said “kittens.” He never imagined they would get so popular and has never sent a cat picture himself.
As a bit of history, Google currently gets over 100 billion searches a month, but the first search engine, AliWeb, was created in 1993 and can still be accessed here. Even by 1995, 42 percent of Americans had never heard of the Internet, but by 2014, 87 percent of adults used the Internet. Now to blow your minds — over 4 billion webpages exist today.
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