World Wide Web Foundations and Operations

Origins and invention at CERN

The World Wide Web was invented by Tim Berners-Lee while he worked at CERN. In 1989, he proposed a “universal linked information system” to solve CERN’s practical problem of storing, updating, and finding documents and distributing them to collaborators outside the lab. Rather than using rigid tree structures or keyword-tagging approaches, his design adopted hypertext linking concepts and aimed to support links across multiple databases on independent computers, with access for many users from anywhere on the Internet. Berners-Lee implemented a working system by the end of 1990, including the first web browser (WorldWideWeb) and an HTTP server running at CERN. He also defined early versions of the HTTP protocol and the basic URL syntax, with HTML emerging as the primary document format. The technology was released outside CERN to other research institutions in 1991 and then made available to the whole Internet in August 1991. CERN later released the web protocol and code royalty-free in April 1993, helping the Web spread rapidly beyond academia.

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Universal linked information system concept

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