1991 – The World Wide Web is opened to the public.
The World Wide Web, a revolutionary technology, was conceived by English computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee while he was working at CERN. Berners-Lee was driven by the challenge of efficiently storing, updating, and retrieving documents and data files within the vast and ever-evolving organization, as well as facilitating their distribution to collaborators beyond CERN. In March 1989, he submitted a proposal to CERN, but without naming the system. By the end of 1990, he had successfully implemented a working system, which included a browser named WorldWideWeb (later becoming the name of the project and the network itself) and an HTTP server operating at CERN. As part of this development, he defined the initial version of the HTTP protocol, established the fundamental URL syntax, and implicitly established HTML as the primary document format. The technology was subsequently released to other research institutions starting in January 1991 and then made available to the entire world on August 23, 1991. The Web’s success at CERN paved the way for its widespread adoption across various scientific and academic institutions. Within the next two years, an impressive 50 websites were created.
In a significant milestone, CERN made the Web protocol and code freely available on April 30, 1993, thereby facilitating its widespread use. This move was further propelled by the release of the Mosaic web browser by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) later that year. The rapid growth in the popularity of the Web was evident as thousands of websites emerged in less than a year. Mosaic, a graphical browser, introduced the capability to display inline images and submit forms that were processed by the HTTPd server.
Leave a Reply