World Wide Web turns 30

Web’s inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee took part in the 30th Anniversary event at CERN. Photo courtesy of © 2019 CERN

In 1989 Sir Tim Berners-Lee, then a young British computer scientist working at CERN invented the World Wide Web that became one of the greatest inventions of the century.

Thirty years ago, Tim Berners-Lee wrote a proposal to develop a structure that would link information about accelerators and experiments across different computers at the physics research laboratory CERN.

An image of the first page of Tim Berners-Lee’s proposal for the World Wide Web in March 1989. Photo courtesy of © 2019 CERN

The first world’s website had information about the World Wide project and was hosted on Sir Berners-Lee’s NeXT computer.

The idea that was meant to help scientists easily share data soon spread into the world.

In August 1991, the World Wide Web became publicly available as Sir Berners-Lee posted about his project on Internet newsgroups. Two years later, CERN put the World Wide Web into the public domain allowing everyone to use it for free.

Tim Berners-Lee demonstrates the World Wide Web to delegates at the Hypertext 1991 conference in San Antonio, Texas. Photo courtesy of © 1991-2019 CERN