The World Wide Web. 

It appeared out of nowhere around the late 80’s/early 90’s and has now become a completely integral part of our daily lives and a necessary tool to do well, pretty much everything.  

So when did it all come into creation? And who were the innovators behind such a monumental global communication platform? 

 

To Begin @ The Beginning 

The Internet as we know it today was created in the late 1960's as a collaborative effort between a variety of different universities and the U.S. Department of Defence (ARPANET). The first known fully operational packet-switching network, the ARPANET was designed to facilitate communication between ARPA computer terminals during the early 1960s, at a time when computers where far too expensive for widespread usage. 

Source: ARPA Network Geographic Map, September 1973. 

 

The Internet Meets The World Wide Web

The marriage between the Internet and the World Wide Web was made possible by Tim Berners-Lee, the son of two mathematicians who built his first computer using: a soldering iron, TTL gates, an M6800 processor and an old television at Oxford University in the late 70’s whilst completing a major in Physics.    

Source: Tim Berners-Lee

 

Tim’s early work included: writing typesetting software; writing a generic macro language; working on bar code technology; working on FASTBUS system software and designing a heterogeneous remote procedure call system.

His later work would use the already existing platform of the Internet as the foundation for how the World Wide Web would function. 

 

CERN: Birthplace Of The World Wide Web

CERN, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research, whose physicists and engineers are most well known for probing the fundamental structure of the universe, is also the birthplace of the World Wide Web.  

It was in 1980, while a freelancer at CERN that Berners-Lee wrote but never published his first program for storing information called "Enquire" which would foreshadow his later work on the World Wide Web.

Source: CERN's Large Hadron Collider. 

 

The Foundation Of HTML, HTTP & URL’s 

Tim Berners-Lee is considered the primary author (with assistance from his colleagues at CERN) of HTML (Hypertext markup language used to create web pages) HTTP (HyperText Transfer Protocol) and URLs (Universal Resource Locators). 

While at CERN Tim had grown increasingly frustrated with how information was being shared and organized. Every computer at CERN stored different information, which required unique log-ins, and not every computer could be easily accessed. It was out of this frustration that in 1989 following on from his earlier “Enquire” work he proposed a global hypertext project, to be known as the World Wide Web, a design that would allow people to work together by combining their knowledge in a web of hypertext documents.

In October 1990 Tim wrote the first World Wide Web server, "httpd", along with his first client, "WorldWideWeb" which was a what-you-see-is-what-you-get hypertext browser/editor, which ran in the NeXTStep environment. 

The "WorldWideWeb" program was first made available within CERN in December, and on the Internet at large in the summer of 1991.

Source: A hand conversion to HTML of the original MacWord document written in March 1989.

 

Where Is Tim Berners-Lee Now?

Sir Tim Berners-Lee (as he is now known) is keeping busy as the Founder and Director of the World Wide Web Consortium, an organization aimed at developing sustainable Web standards. He also works as the director of the World Wide Web Foundation, a co-director of the Web Science Trust, and is a professor at the University of Southampton's Computer Science Department.

Source: Berners-Lee was knighted in 2004 for "services to the global development of the Internet” 

 

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