history of websites

World Wide Web Foundation

• History of the Web
• Sir Tim Berners-Lee

Sir Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web in 1989.

Image: © CERN

Sir Tim Berners-Lee is a British computer scientist. He was born in London, and his parents were early computer scientists, working on one of the earliest computers.

Growing up, Sir Tim was interested in trains and had a model railway in his bedroom. He recalls :

“I made some electronic gadgets to control the trains. Then I ended up getting more interested in electronics than trains. Later on, when I was in college I made a compute r out of an old television set.”

After graduating from Oxford University, Berners-Lee became a software engineer at CERN , the large particle physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland. Scientists come from all over the world to use its accelerators, but Sir Tim noticed that they were having difficulty sharing information.

“In those days, there was different information on different computers, but you had to log on to different computers to get at it. Also, sometimes you had to learn a different program on each computer. Often it was just easier to go and ask people when they were having coffee…”, Tim says .

Tim thought he saw a way to solve this problem – one that he could see could also have much broader applications. Already, millions of computers were being connected together through the fast-developing internet and Berners-Lee realised they could share information by exploiting an emerging technology called hypertext.

In March 1989, Tim laid out his vision for what would become the web in a document called “ Information Management: A Proposal ”. Believe it or not, Tim’s initial proposal was not immediately accepted. In fact, his boss at the time, Mike Sendall , noted the words “Vague but exciting” on the cover. The web was never an official CERN project, but Mike managed to give Tim time to work on it in September 1990. He began work using a NeXT computer, one of Steve Jobs’ early products.

By October of 1990, Tim had written the three fundamental technologies that remain the foundation of today’s web (and which you may have seen appear on parts of your web browser):

• HTML: HyperText Markup Language. The markup (formatting) language for the web.
• URI: Uniform Resource Identifier. A kind of “address” that is unique and used to identify to each resource on the web. It is also commonly called a URL.
• HTTP: Hypertext Transfer Protocol. Allows for the retrieval of linked resources from across the web.

Tim also wrote the first web page editor/browser (“WorldWideWeb.app”) and the first web server (“httpd“). By the end of 1990, the first web page was served on the open internet, and in 1991, people outside of CERN were invited to join this new web community.

As the web began to grow, Tim realised that its true potential would only be unleashed if anyone, anywhere could use it without paying a fee or having to ask for permission.

He explains : “Had the technology been proprietary, and in my total control, it would probably not have taken off. You can’t propose that something be a universal space and at the same time keep control of it.”

So, Tim and others advocated to ensure that CERN would agree to make the underlying code available on a royalty-free basis, forever. This decision was announced in April 1993 , and sparked a global wave of creativity, collaboration and innovation never seen before. In 2003, the companies developing new web standards committed to a Royalty Free Policy for their work. In 2014, the year we celebrated the web’s 25th birthday , almost two in five people around the world were using it.

Tim moved from CERN to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1994 to found the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), an international community devoted to developing open web standards . He remains the Director of W3C to this day.

The early web community produced some revolutionary ideas that are now spreading far beyond the technology sector:

• Decentralisation: No permission is needed from a central authority to post anything on the web, there is no central controlling node, and so no single point of failure … and no “kill switch”! This also implies freedom from indiscriminate censorship and surveillance.
• Non-discrimination: If I pay to connect to the internet with a certain quality of service, and you pay to connect with that or a greater quality of service, then we can both communicate at the same level. This principle of equity is also known as Net Neutrality.
• Bottom-up design: Instead of code being written and controlled by a small group of experts, it was developed in full view of everyone, encouraging maximum participation and experimentation.
• Universality: For anyone to be able to publish anything on the web, all the computers involved have to speak the same languages to each other, no matter what different hardware people are using; where they live; or what cultural and political beliefs they have. In this way, the web breaks down silos while still allowing diversity to flourish.
• Consensus: For universal standards to work, everyone had to agree to use them. Tim and others achieved this consensus by giving everyone a say in creating the standards, through a transparent, participatory process at W3C.

New permutations of these ideas are giving rise to exciting new approaches in fields as diverse as information (Open Data), politics (Open Government), scientific research (Open Access), education, and culture (Free Culture). But to date we have only scratched the surface of how these principles could change society and politics for the better.

In 2009, Sir Tim co-founded the World Wide Web Foundation with Rosemary Leith. The Web Foundation is fighting for the web we want: a web that is safe, empowering and for everyone.

Please do explore our site and our work . We hope you’ll be inspired by our vision and decide to take action. Remember, as Tim tweeted during the Olympics Opening Ceremony in 2012, “This is for Everyone” .

This is for everyone #london2012 #oneweb #openingceremony @webfoundation @w3c — Tim Berners-Lee (@timberners_lee) July 27, 2012

Important Note: This text is intended as a brief introduction to the history of the web. For a more detailed account, you might want to consider reading:

A Little History of the World Wide Web

• W3C’s 10th Anniversary ( timeline )
• “Weaving the Web” by Tim Berners-Lee
• Frequently Asked Questions , and Answers for Young People , by Sir Tim Berners-Lee on W3C website.
• With the web becoming an increasingly monitored space, each of us has a role to play in safeguarding online privacy
• Online Gender-Based Violence Story – Maria, Costa Rica
• Online Gender-Based Violence Story – Aisha, Nigeria

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CERN Accelerating science

• short history web

A short history of the Web

The Web has grown to revolutionise communications worldwide

Where the Web was born

Tim Berners-Lee, a British scientist, invented the World Wide Web (WWW) in 1989, while working at CERN. The Web was originally conceived and developed to meet the demand for automated information-sharing between scientists in universities and institutes around the world.

CERN is not an isolated laboratory, but rather the focal point for an extensive community that includes more than 17 000 scientists from over 100 countries. Although they typically spend some time on the CERN site, the scientists usually work at universities and national laboratories in their home countries. Reliable communication tools are therefore essential.

The basic idea of the WWW was to merge the evolving technologies of computers, data networks and hypertext into a powerful and easy to use global information system.

How the Web began

Tim Berners-Lee wrote the first proposal for the World Wide Web in March 1989 and his second proposal in May 1990 . Together with Belgian systems engineer Robert Cailliau, this was formalised as a management proposal in November 1990. This outlined the principal concepts and it defined important terms behind the Web. The document described a "hypertext project" called "WorldWideWeb" in which a "web" of "hypertext documents" could be viewed by “browsers”.

By the end of 1990, Tim Berners-Lee had the first Web server and browser up and running at CERN, demonstrating his ideas. He developed the code for his Web server on a NeXT computer. To prevent it being accidentally switched off, the computer had a hand-written label in red ink: " This machine is a server. DO NOT POWER IT DOWN!! "

info.cern.ch was the address of the world's first website and Web server, running on a NeXT computer at CERN. The first Web page address was http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html

This page contained links to information about the WWW project itself, including a description of hypertext, technical details for creating a Web server, and links to other Web servers as they became available.

The WWW design allowed easy access to existing information and an early web page linked to information useful to CERN scientists (e.g. the CERN phone book and guides for using CERN’s central computers). A search facility relied on keywords - there were no search engines in the early years.

Berners-Lee’s original Web browser running on NeXT computers showed his vision and had many of the features of current Web browsers. In addition, it included the ability to modify pages from directly inside the browser – the first Web editing capability. This screenshot shows the browser running on a NeXT computer in 1993 .

The Web extends

Only a few users had access to a NeXT computer platform on which the first browser ran, but development soon started on a simpler, ‘line-mode’ browser , which could run on any system. It was written by Nicola Pellow during her student work placement at CERN.

In 1991, Berners-Lee released his WWW software. It included the ‘line-mode’ browser, Web server software and a library for developers. In March 1991, the software became available to colleagues using CERN computers. A few months later, in August 1991, he announced the WWW software on Internet newsgroups and interest in the project spread around the world.

Going global

Thanks to the efforts of Paul Kunz and Louise Addis, the first Web server in the US came online in December 1991, once again in a particle physics laboratory: the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) in California. At this stage, there were essentially only two kinds of browser. One was the original development version, which was sophisticated but available only on NeXT machines. The other was the ‘line-mode’ browser, which was easy to install and run on any platform but limited in power and user-friendliness. It was clear that the small team at CERN could not do all the work needed to develop the system further, so Berners-Lee launched a plea via the internet for other developers to join in. Several individuals wrote browsers, mostly for the X-Window System. Notable among these were MIDAS by Tony Johnson from SLAC, Viola by Pei Wei from technical publisher O'Reilly Books, and Erwise by Finnish students from Helsinki University of Technology.

Early in 1993, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois released a first version of its Mosaic browser. This software ran in the X Window System environment, popular in the research community, and offered friendly window-based interaction. Shortly afterwards the NCSA released versions also for the PC and Macintosh environments. The existence of reliable user-friendly browsers on these popular computers had an immediate impact on the spread of the WWW. The European Commission approved its first web project (WISE) at the end of the same year, with CERN as one of the partners. On 30 April 1993, CERN made the source code of WorldWideWeb available on a royalty-free basis, making it free software. By late 1993 there were over 500 known web servers, and the WWW accounted for 1% of internet traffic, which seemed a lot in those days (the rest was remote access, e-mail and file transfer). 1994 was the “Year of the Web”. Initiated by Robert Cailliau, the First International World Wide Web conference was held at CERN in May. It was attended by 380 users and developers , and was hailed as the “Woodstock of the Web”.

As 1994 progressed, stories about the Web hit the media. A second conference, attended by 1300 people, was held in the US in October, organised by the NCSA and the newly-formed International WWW Conference Committee (IW3C2). By the end of 1994, the Web had 10 000 servers - 2000 of which were commercial - and 10 million users. Traffic was equivalent to shipping the entire collected works of Shakespeare every second. The technology was continually extended to cater for new needs. Security and tools for e-commerce were the most important features soon to be added.

Open standards

An essential point was that the web should remain an open standard for all to use and that no-one should lock it up into a proprietary system. In this spirit, CERN submitted a proposal to the Commission of the European Union under the ESPRIT programme: “WebCore”. The goal of the project was to form an international consortium, in collaboration with the US Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). In 1994, Berners-Lee left CERN to join MIT and founded the International World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). Meanwhile, with approval of the LHC project clearly in sight, CERN decided that further web development was an activity beyond the laboratory’s primary mission. A new European partner for W3C was needed.

The European Commission turned to the French National Institute for Research in Computer Science and Controls (INRIA), to take over CERN's role. In April 1995, INRIA became the first European W3C host, followed by Keio University of Japan (Shonan Fujisawa Campus) in Asia in 1996. In 2003, ERCIM (European Research Consortium in Informatics and Mathematics) took over the role of European W3C Host from INRIA. In 2013, W3C announced Beihang University as the fourth Host. In September 2018, there were more than 400 member organisations from around the world.

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World wide web timeline.

Since its founding in 1989, the World Wide Web has touched the lives of billions of people around the world and fundamentally changed how we connect with others, the nature of our work, how we discover and share news and new ideas, how we entertain ourselves and how communities form and function.

The timeline below is the beginning of an effort to capture both the major milestones and small moments that have shaped the Web since 1989. It is a living document that we will update with your contributions. To suggest an item to add to the timeline, please  message us .

• 42% of American adults have used a computer.
• Tim Berners-Lee develops the first Web browser WorldWideWeb .
• Archie , the first tool to search the internet is developed by McGill University student Alan Emtage.
• The term “ surfing the internet ” is coined and popularized.

• The line-mode browser launches . It is the first readily accessible browser for the World Wide Web.
• CERN places its World Wide Web technology in the public domain , donating it to the world.
• The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) releases Mosaic 1.0 , the first web browser to become popular with the general public. “The web as we know it begins to flourish,” Wired later writes .
• The New York Times writes about the Web browser Mosaic and the World Wide Web for the first time. “Think of it as a map to the buried treasures of the Information Age.”
• Marc Andreessen  proposes  the IMG HTML tag to allow the display of images on the Web.

• 11 million American households are “ equipped to ride the information superhighway .”

• President Bill Clinton’s White House comes online .
• Yahoo! is created  by Stanford University graduate students Jerry Yang and David Filo. They originally named the site “Jerry and David’s Guide to the World Wide Web.”
• Two lawyers post the first massive, commercial spam message  with the subject “Green Card Lottery -Final One?”
• 18 million American homes are now online, but only 3% of online users have ever signed on to the World Wide Web .

• Craig Newmark starts craigslist , originally an email list of San Francisco events.
• Match.com, the first online dating site, launches .
• Entrepreneur Pierre Omidyar launches eBay , originally named “AuctionWeb.” He lists the first item for sale: a broken laser pointer . A collector purchases it for $14.83.
• Chris Lamprecht becomes the first person to be banned from the internet by judicial decree. “I told the judge computers were my life,” Lamprecht later recalled.
• Netscape IPO starts the gold rush mentality for Web startups.
• Microsoft releases Windows 95  and the first version of Internet Explorer .
• Web hosting service GeoCities launches.
• 77% of online users send or receive e-mail at least once every few weeks, up from 65% in 1995.

• HoTMaiL launches as  one of the world’s first Webmail services , its name a reference to the HTML internet language used to build webpages.
• The Dancing Baby , a 3D animation, becomes one of the first viral videos.

• Netflix  launches as a company  that sends DVDs to homes via mail.
• Go Daddy launches as Jomax Technologies.
• Google.com  registers as a domain .
• Jorn Barger  becomes the first person to use the term “Weblog”  to describe the list of links on his website.

• AOL launches AOL 4.0 and inundates American homes with CD-ROM mailers . AOL membership jumps from 8 million to 16 million members.
• The Internet Corporations for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) takes over responsibility for the coordination of the global internet’s systems of unique identifiers.
• Oxford Dictionary adds “spam” and “digerati.”
• Pew Research Center tests online polling  with mixed results.
• MP3 downloading service Napster launches, overloading high-speed networks in college dormitories. Many colleges ban the service and it is later shut down for enabling the illegal sharing of music files.
• Yahoo! acquires GeoCities for $3.6 billion.
• 43% of internet users say they would miss going online “a lot,” up from 32% in 1995.
• 78% of internet users who download music  don’t think it’s stealing  to save music files to their computer hard drives.

40 million Americans – or 48% of internet users – have purchased a product online .

• 32% of internet users (over 30 million people)  sent e-greeting cards to loved ones and friends.

• AOL acquires Time Warner for $165 billion.  New York Times  says “it could be the internet companies that do the buying and the old media that sell out.”
• Only 3% of internet users say they got most of their information about the 9/11 attacks and the aftermath from the internet.

The average internet user spends  83 minutes  online.

• Jimmy Wales launches  Wikipedia . Users write over 20,000 encyclopedia entries in the first year.
• 55 million people now go online from work  and 44% of those who have internet access at work say their use of the internet helps them do their jobs.

• Microsoft launches Xbox Live , its online multiplayer gaming service.”Critics scoffed at the idea, noting how uncommon broadband connections were at the time.”
• Skype, a voice-over-IP calling and instant messaging service, launches and quickly becomes a verb, as in “Skype me.”
• Professional networking site LinkedIn launches.
• MySpace.com  is founded  and quickly adopted by musicians seeking to share music and build their fan bases.
• President George W. Bush signs the CAN-SPAM Act into law , establishing the first national standards for the sending of commercial email.
• WordPress blog publishing system created.
• 11% of American internet users follow the returns on election night online. One-in-ten internet users sign up for political email newsletters and news alerts during the campaign.

• Google starts trading on the NASDAQ at $85 a share .
• Social news website Digg launches. Digg users vote to “digg up” links that they like and “bury” down those they don’t.
• Mozilla releases Firefox 1.0 .
• Massively multiplayer online role-playing game(MMORPG)  World of Warcraft launches.
• 8% of adult American internet users say they participate in sports fantasy leagues online.
• 9% of internet users (13 million Americans)  went online to donate money  to the victims of Gulf Coast hurricanes Katrina and Rita.

About one-in-six online adults – 25 million people – have sold something online .

• Broadband connections surpass dial-up connections.
• Community news site  Reddit  is founded. It is bought by Conde Nast a year later for $20 million.
• Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. buys MySpace for $580 million and  sells it  in 2011 for $35 million.

• The late Senator Ted Stevens describes the internet as “a series of tubes,” during a 2006 speech on net neutrality. His quote is  mocked by Boing Boing  and the  Daily Show  and inspires YouTube remixes.

• Twitter launches. Founder Jack Dorsey sends the first tweet: “just setting up my twttr”

just setting up my twttr — jack 🌍🌏🌎 (@jack) March 21, 2006

• 36% of American online adults consult Wikipedia .

• 36% of Americans say they would have a hard time giving up their Blackberry or other wireless email device, up from 6% in 2002.

• Estonia becomes the world’s first country to use internet voting in a parliamentary election .
• Three-quarters (74%) of internet users – or 55% of the entire U.S. adult population — say they went online during the presidential election to take part in or get news and information about the campaign.
• 19% of cellphone owners say they have gone online with their phones .
• Google releases the Chrome Web browser .
• HTML5  is introduced.
• Deal-of-the-day website Groupon launches.
• Apple launches its App Store  with 552 applications.
• Microsoft offers to buy Yahoo! for $44.6 billion , but the two companies  cannot agree on a purchase price .
• World of Warcraft hits 11.5 million subscribers worldwide. Guinness Book of World Records names it the most popular MMORPG .
• 69% of Americans turn to the internet to cope with and understand the recession .
• Microsoft’s  Bing  search engine launches.
• Twitter raises $98 million from investors,  valuing the company at a whopping $1 billion .
• The Web is transfixed by the tale of a six-year-old boy  flying over Colorado  in a weather balloon. The story later proves to be a hoax .
• Kanye West’s VMA outburst sparks an internet meme .

• 35% of adults have cell phones with apps , but only two-thirds actually use them.
• Social photo-sharing sites Pinterest and Instagram launch.
• Wikileaks collaborates with major media organizations to release U.S. diplomatic cables .
• Ex-Facebook employees launch user-based question and answer site Quora .
• 15% of social media-using teens say they have been the target of online meanness .
• 68% of all Americans say the internet has had a major impact on the ability of groups to communicate with members .
• LinkedIn reaches 100 million users and debuts on NYSE .
• Microsoft buys Skype  for $8.5 billion.
• Google+ launches .
• Young Egyptians use the hashtags #Egypt and #Jan25 on Twitter to spread the word about the Egyptian Revolution.  The government responds by shutting down the internet .

• 66% of internet users use Facebook and 12% use Instagram .
• Among the 13% of US adults who made a financial contribution to a presidential candidate, 50% donated online or via email .
• Facebook reaches 1 billion monthly active users, making it the dominant social network worldwide. Some analysts start calling it “ Facebookistan .” The company buys Instagram  for $1 billion and  debuts on NASDAQ at $38 a share.

• Ecommerce sales top $1 trillion worldwide .
• The Internet Society founds the Internet Hall of Fame  to “celebrate people who bring the internet to life.”
• A majority (56%) of Americans  now own a smartphone of some kind .
• 51% of U.S. adults bank online .

• Apple says app store downloads  top 40 billion , with 20 billion in 2012 alone.
• Twitter files for its long-awaited IPO . Shares soar 73% above their IPO price of $26 a share on the first day of trading.

We’ve confidentially submitted an S-1 to the SEC for a planned IPO. This Tweet does not constitute an offer of any securities for sale. — Twitter (@Twitter) September 12, 2013

• 45% of internet users ages 18-29 in serious relationships say the internet has had an impact on their relationship .
• Facebook buys messaging app Whatsapp for $19 billion.

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A Look Back At The Very First Website Ever Launched, 30 Years Later

Josie Fischels

This picture taken on April 30, 2013 in Geneva shows a 1992 copy of the world's first web page. Fabrice Coffrini /AFP via Getty Images hide caption

This picture taken on April 30, 2013 in Geneva shows a 1992 copy of the world's first web page.

On August 6, 1991, the first website was introduced to the world.

And while perhaps not as exciting or immersive as some of the nearly 1.9 billion websites that exist today, it makes sense that the first web page launched on the good ol' W3 was, well, instructions about how to use it.

The first website contained information about the World Wide Web Project. It launched at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, CERN, where it was created by British computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee. On it, people could find out how to create web pages and learn about hypertext (coded words or phrases that link to content).

Berners-Lee created the web for the same reason a lot of us visit websites today: to make life just a little bit easier. For him, the problem to be solved rested in computers themselves: there was no way to share information between different devices.

The Father Of The Web Is Selling The Source Code As An NFT

And so in 1989, Berners-Lee proposed the idea for an information management system to his managers at CERN. The system would use hypertext to connect documents on separate computers connected to the Internet.

At first, the managers' response was something along the lines of cool, but no thanks. But when Berners-Lee returned with a new-and-improved proposal a year later, the computer scientist was granted permission to work on the project. By 1991, it was ready to launch. Berners-Lee had developed HTML, HTTP and URLs — the building blocks for creating websites — all on his NeXT computer designed by Steve Jobs.

And so, with the creation of a single web page, the World Wide Web was born. And it's grown quite a bit since then. There were 10 websites by 1992, 3,000 websites by 1994 (after the W3 became public domain), and 2 million by the time the search engine Google made its debut in 1996.

It's worth mentioning that the first website was also lost . Excited by progress and unable at the time to fathom the true scope of the web's abilities, computer scientists didn't archive many of the very first websites. A project to restore the world's first web page was launched in 2013 by CERN.

But not to worry: It's back now, even at its origina l URL , for you to explore.

Josie Fischels is an intern on NPR's News Desk.

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The World’s First Web Site

By: Elizabeth Nix

Updated: August 30, 2018 | Original: August 4, 2016

The son of computer scientists, Berners-Lee was born in London in 1955 (the same year as Steve Jobs and Bill Gates) and studied physics at Oxford. While employed at CERN in the 1980s, Berners-Lee observed how tough it was to keep track of the projects and computer systems of the organization’s thousands of researchers, who were spread around the globe. As he later stated: “In those days, there was different information on different computers, but you had to log on to different computers to get at it. Also, sometimes you had to learn a different program on each computer.”

In March 1989, Berners-Lee gave managers at CERN a proposal for an information management system that used hypertext to link documents on different computers that were connected to the Internet. (Hypertext, a term coined in 1963, allows a person to get a document or piece of content by clicking on a coded word or phrase.) Labelled “vague but exciting” by his boss, the proposal at first wasn’t accepted. Berners-Lee teamed up with Robert Cailliau, a Belgian engineer at CERN, to refine the proposal, and in 1990 the Englishman’s boss gave him time to work on the project. After originally calling the project Information Management, Berners-Lee tried out names such as Mine of Information and Information Mesh before settling on WorldWideWeb.

By the end of 1990, Berners-Lee, using a Steve Jobs-designed NeXT computer, had developed the key technologies that are the bedrock of the Web, including Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), for creating Web pages; Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), a set of rules for transferring data across the Web; and Uniform Resource Locators (URLs), or Web addresses for finding a document or page. He also had devised a basic browser and Web server software.

The beginning of the Web as a publicly available service on the Internet arrived on August 6, 1991, when Berners-Lee published the first-ever website. Fittingly, the site was about the World Wide Web project, describing the Web and how to use it. Hosted at CERN on Berners-Lee’s NeXT computer, the site’s URL was http://info.cern.ch.

Berners-Lee didn’t try to cash in on his invention and rejected CERN’s call to patent his Web technology. He wanted the Web to be open and free so it could expand and evolve as rapidly as possible. As he later said, “Had the technology been proprietary, and in my total control, it would probably not have taken off. You can’t propose that something be a universal space and at the same time keep control of it.”

In 1993, a team at the University of Illinois’ National Center for Supercomputing Applications released Mosaic, the first Web browser to become popular with the general public. The next few years saw the launch of such websites as Yahoo (1994), Amazon (1995), eBay (1995) and Google (1998). By the time Facebook debuted in 2004, there were more than 51 million websites, according to Internet Live Stats .

Meanwhile, in 1994, Berners-Lee left CERN for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he founded the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), an organization that maintains standards for the Web. The low-profile visionary went on to be named one of Time Magazine’s 100 Most Important People of the 20th Century, and in 2004 was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II. In 2009, Berners-Lee started the World Wide Web Foundation, an organization focused on ensuring the Web benefits humanity. During the opening ceremony at the 2012 Summer Olympics in London, he was honored for inventing the Web and tweeted, “This is for everyone.”

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In 1989, Sir Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web (see the original proposal ). He coined the term "World Wide Web," wrote the first World Wide Web server, "httpd," and the first client program (a browser and editor), "WorldWideWeb," in October 1990.

He wrote the first version of the "HyperText Markup Language" ( HTML ), the document formatting language with the capability for hypertext links that became the primary publishing format for the Web. His initial specifications for URIs, HTTP, and HTML were refined and discussed in larger circles as Web technology spread.

A Consortium for the World Wide Web

In 1994, the decision to form the World Wide Web Consortium came at the urging of many companies investing increasing resources into the web. Sir Tim Berners-Lee started leading the essential work of the Web Consortium team to foster a consistent architecture accommodating the rapid pace of progress in web standards for building websites, browsers, devices to experience all that the web has to offer.

In founding the World Wide Web Consortium, Sir Tim Berners-Lee created a community of peers. Web technologies were already moving so quickly that it was critical to assemble a single organization to coordinate web standards. Tim accepted the offer from MIT, who had experience with consortia, to host W3C. He required from the start that W3C have a global footprint.

The Hosted model (1994-2022)

In October 1994, Sir Tim Berners-Lee founded the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Laboratory for Computer Science [MIT/LCS] in collaboration with CERN , where the Web originated (see information on the original CERN Server ), with support from DARPA and the European Commission .

In April 1995, Inria (Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et Automatique) became the first European W3C host, followed by Keio University of Japan (Shonan Fujisawa Campus) in Asia in 1996. In 2003, ERCIM (European Research Consortium in Informatics and Mathematics) took over the role of European W3C Host from INRIA. In 2013, W3C announced Beihang University as the fourth Host.

The four partnered administratively in a Hosted model to manage W3C Members and provide employment of the global W3C staff working under the direction of W3C’s management.

Public-interest non-profit organization

The World Wide Web Consortium began the year 2023 by forming a new public-interest non-profit organization.

The new mission-driven entity preserves our member-oriented approach, existing worldwide outreach and cooperation while allowing for additional partners around the world beyond Europe and Asia. The new organization also preserves the core process and mission of the Consortium to shepherd the web, by developing open web standards as a single global organization with contributions from W3C Members, staff, and the international community.

"Today I am proud of the profound impact W3C has had, its many achievements accomplished with our Members and the public, and I look forward to the continued empowering enhancements W3C enables as it launches its own public-interest non-profit organization, building on 28 years of experience." Sir Tim Berners-Lee, Web Inventor and Founder of W3C, 31 January 2023

Read more about W3C

More history resources

• W3C News Archive
• Press Release Archive
• W3C's Tenth Anniversary
• A Little Web History

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• Positive Work Environment
• W3C Council
• Corporation