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 data, and of sharing them with collaborators outside the lab. His design moved away from rigid tree structures and keyword tagging, instead adopting hypertext ideas—linking documents through “hot spots”—that allowed links to connect information across different computers and support many simultaneous users. Berners-Lee developed the core technologies at CERN: a working system by the end of 1990, including the first browser (WorldWideWeb) and an HTTP server. He also defined early HTTP protocol details and the basic URL syntax, with HTML emerging as the primary document format. The technology was released outside CERN in 1991 and then made available to the public in 1993, when CERN released the protocol and code royalty-free—helping the Web spread rapidly beyond academia and become a dominant platform for the Information Age.

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Universal linked information system concept

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