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Tim Berners-Lee proposes the web
Berners-Lee writes a paper entitled Information management: a proposal that envisages a system of interlinked documents that would be stored in a variety of locations, and contain non-hierarchical links to one another. These documents could be looked at using a 'browser' application, which would open the internet to potential mass use. -
The web is created
The first web pages begin to appear. At first they are of limited general appeal, but the system has become a reality. -
Browsers develop
The web's transition to the mainstream is helped by the appearance of Mosaic, an intuitive, user-friendly browser, in 1993, and then a year later by Netscape Navigator, which attains an 80% share of web browser usage by 1996. -
Internet explorer
Internet Explorer 3.0 is provided free of charge with Windows 95, a practice known as 'bundling' that later brings Microsoft to the attention of anti-monopoly bodies in the US and EU. With its massive market dominance and tendency to favour Microsoft's own applications such as Media Player, there comes a de facto influence on emerging web technologies; if it doesn't work on IE, it doesn't work for most users. The web is at risk of becoming a proprietary technology. -
Google created
Before Google, sites such as Yahoo! created searchable directories of websites, but Google's focus on technology and indexing gives the impression that it is a gateway to the whole web. -
Wikipedia created
Wikipedia is founded as a "multilingual, web-based, free-content encyclopedia", to which anyone can contribute, and which anyone can access. By 2014 the English-language version has about 4.5million entries -
Facebook
The site, which only becomes generally accessible in 2006, helps millions of people become more active online but is not on the open web as many of its pages, for good reasons, are only accessible to signed-in users. -
iPhone
The iPhone, like Facebook, is another innovation that makes many people more active online, but at the same time draws them away from the open web, in this case into Apple's app ecosystem. Apps are small applications that may use the internet, or even web protocols, but are not usually web browsers.