On April 30, 1993, CERN in Switzerland, declared the underlying code for the World Wide Web (WWW or W3) to be made available on a royalty-free basis, forever, thus launching the WWW into the public domain. [1]
Sir Tim Berners-Lee a British computer scientist based at CERN is credited with invented the World Wide Web in March 1989 following his Information Management “Proposal“. His aim was to “work toward a universal linked information system” creating a universal computing language so as to share information between the interconnected network of computers (the internet) all around the world. Berners-Lee realised they could share information by exploiting an emerging technology called hypertext. [3, 6]
By October of 1990, Tim had written the three fundamental technologies that remain the foundation of today’s web:
- HTML: HyperText Markup Language.
- URI: Uniform Resource Identifier, commonly called URL
- HTTP: Hypertext Transfer Protocol
By the end of 1990, the first web page was served on the open internet, and in 1991, people outside of CERN were invited to join this new web community. Following CERN’s 1993 code release, Tim moved to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1994 and founded the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), an international community devoted to developing open web standards. He remains the Director of W3C to this day. [2]
The history of the internet can be traced back to 1945. [4, 5]
With the advent of the World Wide Web together with search engines such as Google, all manner of information (true, false and in-between) became increasingly and instantly accessible to anyone with a computer.