History of the World Wide Web

The Mundaneum

Feb 11, 1934

Paul Otlet outlined a concept of a globally connected network of computers in The Mundaneum, an institution he founded in 1910 as part of his work on documentation science.

The idea of HyperText

Jan 7, 1945

Vannevar Bush widely published his idea of HyperText.

Birth of the internet

Feb 6, 1969

ARPANET commissioned by DoD for research into networking. Several nodes are used from multiple locations.

Markup Language

Feb 11, 1970

Charles Goldfarb, co-inventor of the first markup language GML, and designer of SGML, coins the term "markup language".

People communicate over a network

Feb 6, 1971

E-mail was invented. Now there was a program to send messages across a distributed network. Also there was 15 nodes (23 hosts) on ARPANET.

Global Networking becomes a reality

Feb 6, 1973

The first international connections to the ARPANET are made between University College of London (England) and Royal Radar Establishment (Norway). Ethernet was outlined so that local networks can communicate. How computers send and receive data was specified.

News Groups born

Feb 6, 1979

The Computer Science Department researched computer networks and established networks in USA. USENET was established using UUCP. Almost any topic has a discussion group today.

ENQUIRE

Feb 11, 1980

While consulting for CERN June-December of 1980, Tim Berners-Lee writes a notebook program, "Enquire-Within-Upon-Everything", which allows links to be made between arbitrary nodes. Each node had a title, a type, and a list of bidirectional typed links.

The Web is finally working

Dec 21, 1990

Berners-Lee had built all the tools necessary for a working Web including the first web browser and editor. For this several names, including Information Mesh, The Information Mine or Mine of Information, were turned down. Tim Berners-Lee and his boss, Mike Sendall, settled on World Wide Web.

Files available on the net

Aug 11, 1991

Files available on the net by FTP, posted on alt.hypertext, comp.sys.next, comp.text.sgml and comp.mail.multi-media.

Mosiac Web Browser

Feb 11, 1993

This graphical browser was developed by a team at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), led by Marc Andreessen.

First International WWW Conference

May 25, 1994

First International WWW Conference, CERN, Geneva. This was heavily oversubscribed (800 applied, 400 allowed). VRML is conceived here. TBL's closing keynote hints at upcoming organization.

Web Society

Jul 11, 1995

Founding of the Web Society in Graz (AT), by the Technical University of Graz (home of Hyper-G), CERN, the University of Minnesota (home of Gopher) and INRIA.