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The World Wide Web is a collection of billions of interlinked websites accessible on the global computer network known as the internet. Wide area networking (WANs) predated the World Wide Web for decades. However, it wasn’t until Tim Berners Lee invented websites in 1989 that the internet of today was truly born. The World Wide Web has been evolving ever since. Tim Berners-Lee was a scientist working at CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research) in the late 1980s and early ‘90s. CERN’s need to share data prompted Tim Berners-Lee to submit a draft proposal for a new kind of distributed information system. That document outlined the idea of linking pages with hypertext. In 1990, Lee submitted another document titled “WorldWideWeb” that included an extended outline for a new hypertext project. By the end of 1990, Tim had laid the foundations of the modern-day World Wide Web. He developed the first web browser, which was called WorldWideWeb.
You can see what that browser was like on this WorldWideWeb page. Everything was then ready for the first website in 1991. Tim hosted the first website on his NeXT server titled “World Wide Web” in that year. It provided a brief introduction to the World Wide Web by describing it as a wide-area information initiative for accessing many documents. That first website remains online today, and you can view it on a dedicated CERN site. The final milestone in the early development of the World Wide Web came in 1993. Then Tim Berners-Lee and CERN submitted a document placing the web in the public domain. That document further defined the World Wide Web and confirmed CERN did not claim any intellectual ownership rights of it. Therefore, nobody owns the Web as CERN adopted an open for all policy. The WorldWideWeb browser Tim developed was little more than a text editor.
It wasn’t until 1992 the first graphical browsers that could handle images emerged. Young programmers in Finland developed the first graphical browser and named it Erwise. However, the developers of Erwise did not seek to commercialize it, and the browser never took off. NCSA released Mosaic in 1993, the first graphical browser that popularized browsing. Mosaic could display images alongside text. Users could now view websites that incorporated text, images, videos, and sound for the first time within Mosaic. Mosaic soon became the biggest browser, with a user base eclipsing the one-million mark. However, Mosaic would not remain the world’s foremost web browser for long. Microsoft released Internet Explorer in 1995 and bundled it with their Windows platforms. Internet Explorer emerged victorious in the first browser war, with a user base share reaching the 90 percent mark in its heyday. Internet Explorer has quite a history itself, but we won't dive into that too much here. Websites during the World Wide Web’s early years were rather basic.
However, that started to change in 1995 when the programmer Brandan Eich developed the JavaScript scripting language for webpages. JavaScript soon became one of the core languages for website development alongside HTML and CSS. It enabled website designers to add interactive elements to pages and create more dynamic sites. Jeff Bezos founded the Amazon site in 1995. Though Bezos originally called it Cadabara (a magical spell), he later chose Amazon, one of the world’s longest rivers, to be the name. Amazon started as a website selling books but expanded to sell much, much more as it became the world’s largest online retailer. The computer scientists Sergey Brin and Larry Page founded the Google search engine and company during 1997-1998. The Google search engine was originally called BackRub, but Brin and Page soon renamed it. It was supposed to be called Googol, but a typo established the Google domain name. Blogs (online web diaries and journals) became the new big thing on the World Wide Web during 1999-2003. Blogger was one of the first notable blogging platforms established in 1999 that enabled users to set up online journals from templates.
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