1990

World Wide Web

Robert Cailliau (b. 1947), Tim Berners-Lee (b. 1955)

In the mid-1980s, the Internet existed, and people were using it. The number of host computers connected to the Internet in 1987 was about 10,000. However, nearly every person using the Internet at that time was affiliated with the universities, companies, and research organizations that provided the host computers. The public had no access.

At this time, people were using a variety of Internet tools to move information around. E-mail and FTP (File Transfer Protocol) were two of the most common. A person could upload a file to a FTP server and then send e-mail to people telling them that they could download the file. People could connect to computers remotely using Telnet. It all worked, but the Internet was a bit technical and cumbersome.

Then, in 1990, everything began to change, when British computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee and Belgian computer scientist Robert Cailliau, proposed a “hypertext project” for the “WorldWideWeb.” The World Wide Web was born, and it made the Internet incredibly easy to use as an information tool. On the one hand it was so simple, but on the other hand it was so incredibly powerful. As a result, the web has changed so many things, including the way goods are bought and sold, the way news and information are delivered, the way we educate people, the way people communicate. In addition, it utterly leveled the playing field. Suddenly, anyone could publish information to millions of people.

There were four core ideas that had to be engineered simultaneously for the web to work: 1) the web server, which holds web pages for people to access, 2) the web browser, which can gather and assemble web pages from servers so people can view them, 3) the web markup language, called HTML, which allows people to create web pages, and 4) the web protocol, named HTTP, which allows for communication between server and browser. Once a web server existed with a web page in HTML on it, and someone had a web browser, the web was born. And then it spread like wildfire because engineers made accessing the Internet trivially easy.

SEE ALSO ENIAC—The First Digital Computer (1946), ARPANET (1969), Domain Name Service (DNS) (1984).

The World Wide Web continues to change society as we know it today.