The Birth of the Web

In 1989,Tim Berners-Lee first proposal of World wide Web (WWW) was made by the CERN(European organization for nuclear research).

In the same year, a prototype software was demostrated.It was the CERN that developed the first browser although its simple.

 To encourage its adoption, an interface to the CERN Computer Centre's documentation, to the ‘help service’ and also to the familiar Usenet newsgroups was provided.

This NeXT Computer used by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN became the first web server

In starting, all the web servers were located in European physics laboratories, and very few people were givin the access to the NeXT platform which was used to run the first broswer.
Soon CERN promised to provide the very simple browser which can be run on any system.It was the starting of great era of human kind, Era of knowlwdge.Its the knowledge the can make a human more and more powerful.Then next mission for the CERN is to be globally presence of web so that knowledge from every part of the world would be made available.Communication would be ofcourse satellite for distant connectivity.This all reminded the prediction made by Arthur C. Clarke who said in May 1970 that satellite would one day "bring the accumulated knowledge of the world to your fingertips" and Today its fact.

The CERN datacenter in 2010 housing some www servers

It was in 1991 when an early WWW system was released.It include the simple browser, web server software and library,implementing the essential functions for developer to build their own software.A wide range of universities and research laboratories started to use it. A little later it was made generally available via the Internet, especially to the community of people working on hypertext systems.

The first Global journey of WWW started was came when first web server was installed in United states in december 1991 at a a pure research institute: the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) in California.


At this stage, there were essentially only two kinds of browser. One was the original development version, very sophisticated but only available on the NeXT machines. The other was the ‘line-mode’ browser, which was easy to install and run on any platform but limited in power and user-friendliness. It was clear that the small team at CERN could not do all the work needed to develop the system further, so Berners-Lee launched a plea via the Internet for other developers to join in.

Several individuals wrote browsers, mostly for the X-window system. The most notable from this era are MIDAS by Tony Johnson from SLAC, Viola by Pei Wei from O'Reilly, Erwise by the Finns from the Helsinki University of Technology.

Early in 1993, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois released a first version of their Mosaic browser. This software ran in the X Window System environment, popular in the research community, and offered friendly window-based interaction. Shortly afterwards the NCSA released versions also for the PC and Macintosh environments. The existence of reliable user-friendly browsers on these popular computers had an immediate impact on the spread of the WWW. The European Commission approved its first web project (WISE) at the end of the same year, with CERN as one of the partners. By late 1993 there were over 500 known web servers, and the WWW accounted for 1% of Internet traffic, which seemed a lot in those days! (The rest was remote access, e-mail and file transfer.) 1994 really was the ‘Year of the Web’. The world’s First International World Wide Web conference was held at CERN in May. It was attended by 400 users and developers, and was hailed as the ‘Woodstock of the Web’. As 1994 progressed, the Web stories got into all the media. A second conference, attended by 1300 people, was held in the US in October, organised by the NCSA and the already created the International WWW Conference Committee (IW3C2).

Graphic representation of a minute fraction of the WWW, demonstrating hyperlinks

By the end of 1994, the Web had 10,000 servers, of which 2,000 were commercial, and 10 million users. Traffic was equivalent to shipping the entire collected works of Shakespeare every second. The technology was continually extended to cater for new needs. Security and tools for e-commerce were the most important features soon to be added.

Open standards

An essential point was that the Web should remain an open standard for all to use and that no-one should lock it up into a proprietary system.
In this spirit, CERN submitted a proposal to the Commission of the European Union under the ESPRIT programme: ‘WebCore’. The goal of the project was an International Consortium, in collaboration with the US Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Berners-Lee officially left CERN at the end of 1994 to work on the Consortium from the MIT base. But with approval of the LHC project clearly in sight, it was decided that further Web development was an activity beyond the Laboratory’s primary mission. A new home for basic Web work was needed.

The European Commission turned to the French National Institute for Research in Computer Science and Controls (INRIA), to take over the role of CERN.

In January 1995, the International World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) was founded ‘to lead the World Wide Web to its full potential by developing common protocols that promote its evolution and ensure its interoperability’.

By 2007 W3C, run jointly by MIT/LCS in the US, INRIA in France, and Keio University in Japan, had more than 430 member organizations from around the world.