It is hardly credible that there was a time before “The Web”  but the truth of the matter is that is exactly 20 years ago since Tim Berners-Lee launched his invention - an event that didn't attract much attention at the time.

The Web grew out of a hypertext system devised by a British scientist to help him remember the connections between people working at the CERN high-energy physics lab. His initial proposal in 1989  to build a system that would make use of the, already well- established, Internet to share hypertext linked documents received no reply but nevertheless he began working on the idea.

 Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web

In 1990 Berners-Lee wrote the Hyper Text Transfer Protocol HTTP, invented the Hyper Text Markup Language HTML, wrote a client browser and the first web server.

The web server was installed at info.cern.ch and this was the very first web server from which everything grew.

The web went public on August 6, 1991 but it was an event that was largely unnoticed by the world!

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The Web - the early years