History of the World Wide Web

The history of the World Wide Web traces its development from Tim Berners-Lee’s proposal at CERN in 1989 through its spread into a global platform for publishing and communication.

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Tim Berners-Lee: A British computer scientist who invented the World Wide Web while working at CERN. He proposed the Web in 1989 and built its first browser, server, and website.
Uniform Resource Locator: A character string that identifies a resource and indicates how to locate it. URLs gave Web resources stable addresses that could be embedded in links.
First website: The first website, hosted at CERN and published by Tim Berners-Lee in 1991. Its instructions explained the emerging Web and made its resources discoverable.
Dot-com bubble: A period of rapid investment in Internet-based companies that peaked around 2000 and then collapsed. The Web’s commercial growth fueled the boom and shaped expectations for online business.
CERN: A European particle-physics laboratory near Geneva, founded in 1954. Its distributed research community supplied the information-sharing problem that inspired the Web.
Hypertext Transfer Protocol: An application-layer protocol for transferring hypermedia documents between clients and servers. HTTP defined how early browsers requested pages from Web servers.
Line Mode Browser: A text-based Web browser developed at CERN that ran on many computer systems. Its broad compatibility helped people use the Web beyond the NeXT computer.
Web 2.0: A label for Web services emphasizing user participation, social interaction, and dynamic content. It marked a shift from mostly read-only pages toward platforms built around user contributions.
ENQUIRE: A hypertext database system Tim Berners-Lee created at CERN in 1980. Its linked documents and associations anticipated ideas later used in the Web.
HTML: The markup language used to structure documents on the World Wide Web. HTML made pages portable while allowing links and basic document structure.