World Wide Web Launched: Berners-Lee Unites the Globe

A post on an obscure internet newsgroup quietly introduced the most transformative technology since the printing press. On August 6, 1991, Tim Berners-Lee, a British physicist working at CERN in Geneva, published a summary of his World Wide Web project on the alt.hypertext newsgroup, making it available to the public for the first time. The post included a link to the world's first website, which explained what the Web was and how to use it. Almost nobody noticed. Berners-Lee had been developing the Web since 1989, when he submitted a proposal to CERN titled "Information Management: A Proposal." His supervisor's handwritten response — "Vague, but exciting" — became one of history's great understatements. The problem Berners-Lee was trying to solve was mundane: CERN's thousands of researchers used incompatible computer systems and had no efficient way to share documents. His solution combined three technologies: HTML for formatting documents, URLs for locating them, and HTTP for transferring them between computers. The Web was not the internet itself, which had existed since the late 1960s as a network connecting computers. What Berners-Lee created was a system for navigating that network intuitively, linking documents across the world through clickable text. Before the Web, using the internet required technical knowledge and command-line interfaces. After it, anyone who could point and click could access information stored on any connected computer anywhere on Earth. Berners-Lee made a decision that proved as consequential as the invention itself: he gave it away. CERN released the Web's underlying code into the public domain in April 1993, ensuring that no company or government could own the fundamental protocols. Within two years, the number of websites exploded from a handful to tens of thousands. Within a decade, the Web had restructured commerce, communication, politics, and entertainment across the planet, fulfilling and exceeding every implication of that understated CERN memo.