Tim Berners-Lee Proposes the World Wide Web

Date

1989

Category

Science, technology & invention

Region

Europe (Switzerland)

Era

Contemporary

Significance

The computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee circulated a proposal at the CERN physics laboratory near Geneva on 12 March 1989 that laid the conceptual foundation for the World Wide Web, the system that would put a global information network within reach of ordinary people.

Titled "Information Management: A Proposal," the document sought to solve the practical problem of how thousands of researchers at CERN could share documents across incompatible computers, and his manager famously scribbled "vague but exciting" across the top. Berners-Lee proposed linking information through hypertext, so that any document could point to any other regardless of where it was stored, and over the following two years he built the first web browser, server, and the HTML, HTTP, and URL standards that still underpin the web today. Crucially, CERN placed the technology in the public domain in 1993, ensuring it remained free and open rather than proprietary. From this modest internal memo grew a medium that reshaped commerce, communication, media, and daily life for billions of people, ranking among the most consequential inventions of the late twentieth century and defining the information age.

Empires active in 1989

• Soviet Union
  1922 CE – 1991 CE
• British Empire
  1583 CE – 1997 CE
• Portuguese Empire
  1415 CE – 1999 CE
• Yugoslavia
  1918 CE – 1992 CE

Related science, technology & invention events

• CERN releases the World Wide Web into the public domain
  30 April 1993
• Global eradication of smallpox declared
  8 May 1980 (last natural case 1977)
• Google is founded, transforming online search
  4 September 1998
• The Apple II Launches the Personal Computer Era
  1977
• Apple releases the iPhone, launching the smartphone era
  29 June 2007
• Intel Releases the 4004, the First Commercial Microprocessor
  1971

Further reading

A Little History of Science

The wider story

A Little History of Science

William Bynum

Warm, jargon-free tour of discovery from Babylonian stargazers to the genome.

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