Tim Berners-Lee and the World Wide Web

The internet and the World Wide Web are not the same thing. The internet is the global network of connected computers; the web is a system of linked pages that runs on it. In March 1989 Tim Berners-Lee, a British scientist at CERN, the European physics laboratory near Geneva, proposed a system to help researchers share information. He created the key technologies: HTML for writing pages, URLs for addresses and HTTP for transferring pages.

The first website went online at CERN around 1990–91. On 30 April 1993 CERN placed the web software in the public domain, allowing anyone to use it freely. The same year the Mosaic browser made the web easy to use with images. Free, open standards helped the web grow explosively. Berners-Lee later warned about the concentration of power in a few platforms, raising debates about the web's future.