page_title: History of the World Wide Web
section_title: 1980–1991: Invention and implementation
hierarchical_section_title: History of the World Wide Web / 1980–1991: Invention and implementation
caption_attribution_description: English: This NeXT workstation (a NeXTcube, monitor Cern 57503) was used by Tim Berners-Lee as the first Web server on the World Wide Web. It is shown here as displayed in 2005 at Microcosm, the public science museum at CERN where Berners-Lee was working in 1991 when he invented the Web. The document resting on the keyboard is a copy of "CERN DD/OC March 1989 Information Management: A Proposal. Abstract" which was Berners-Lee's original proposal for the World Wide Web. (Further text visible: "...distributed hypertext systems, Hypertext, computer conferencing, document retrieval, information management. Project, IBM Group talk, VAX/Notes, CERNDOC, UUCP News, Hierarchical systems".) The partly peeled off label on the cube itself has the following text: "This machine is a server. DO NOT POWER IT DOWN!!" The labels on top of the server and on the keyboard read "PROPRIETE CERN" (French for "Cern property"). Just below the keyboard (not shown) is a label which reads: "At the end of the 80s, Tim Berners-Lee (TBL) invented the World Wide Web using this Next computer as the first Web server." The book is the enyclopedia in many parts of Robert Kemp Philp, ed.: "Enquire Within upon Everything", London 1856 and later editions, which TBL describes on page one of his book "Weaving the Web. The Original Design and Ultimate Destiny of the World Wide Web as "a musty old book of Victorian advice I noticed as a child in my parents' house outside London". (Text that is almost legible in the high resolution picture: 750. Diuretics, 756. Diaphoretics, 761. Expectorants, 765. Ginger). Text at the beginning of Tim Berners-Lee: Weaving the Web, Chapter 1 Enquire Within upon Everything: "When I first began tinkering with a software program that eventually gave rise to the idea of the World Wide Web, I named it Enquire, short for Enquire Within upon Everything, a musty old book of Victorian advice I noticed as a child in my parents' house outside London. With its title suggestive of magic, the book served as a portal to a world of information, everything from how to remove clothing stains to tips on investing money. Not a perfect analogy for the Web, but a primitive starting point. What that first bit of Enquire code led me to was something much larger, a vision encompassing the decentralized, organic growth of ideas, technology and society. The vision I have for the Web is about anything being potentially connected with anything..." This is a new upload by Coolcaesar of the original JPEG file on en:September 22, en:2008 directly to Commons in response to continued vandalism of the original.
context_page_description: The World Wide Web is a global information medium which users can access via computers connected to the Internet. The term is often mistakenly used as a synonym for the Internet itself and often called "the Internet", but the Web is a service that operates over the Internet, just as email and Usenet also do. The history of the Internet dates back significantly further than that of the World Wide Web.
context_section_description: In 1980, Tim Berners-Lee, an English independent contractor at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Switzerland, built ENQUIRE, as a personal database of people and software models, but also as a way to play with hypertext; each new page of information in ENQUIRE had to be linked to a page.
  Berners-Lee's contract in 1980 was from June to December, but in 1984 he returned to CERN in a permanent role, and considered its problems of information management: physicists from around the world needed to share data, yet they lacked common machines and any shared presentation software.
  Shortly after Berners-Lee's return to CERN, TCP/IP protocols were installed on some key non-Unix machines at the institution, turning it into the largest Internet site in Europe within a few years. As a result, CERN's infrastructure was ready for Berners-Lee to create the Web.
  Berners-Lee wrote a proposal in March 1989 for "a large hypertext database with typed links". Although the proposal attracted little interest, Berners-Lee was encouraged by his boss, Mike Sendall, to begin implementing his system on a newly acquired NeXT workstation. He considered several names, including Information Mesh, The Information Mine or Mine of Information, but settled on World Wide Web.
  Berners-Lee found an enthusiastic supporter in Robert Cailliau. Berners-Lee and Cailliau pitched Berners-Lee's ideas to the European Conference on Hypertext Technology in September 1990, but found no vendors who could appreciate his vision of marrying hypertext with the Internet.
  By Christmas 1990, Berners-Lee had built all the tools necessary for a working Web: the HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP), the HyperText Markup Language (HTML), the first Web browser (named WorldWideWeb, which was also a Web editor), the first HTTP server software (later known as CERN httpd), the first web server (http://info.cern.ch), and the first Web pages that described the project itself. The browser could access Usenet newsgroups and FTP files as well. However, it could run only on the NeXT; Nicola Pellow therefore created a simple text browser, called the Line Mode Browser, that could run on almost any computer. To encourage use within CERN, Bernd Pollermann put the CERN telephone directory on the web—previously users had to log onto the mainframe in order to look up phone numbers.
  While inventing and working on setting up the Web, Berners-Lee spent most of his working hours in Building 31 (second floor) at CERN (46.2325°N 6.0450°E), but also at his two homes, one in France, one in Switzerland. In January 1991 the first Web servers outside CERN itself were switched on.
  The first web page may be lost, but Paul Jones of UNC-Chapel Hill in North Carolina revealed in May 2013 that he has a copy of a page sent to him in 1991 by Berners-Lee which is the oldest known web page. Jones stored the plain-text page, with hyperlinks, on a floppy disk and on his NeXT computer. CERN put the oldest known web page back online in 2014, complete with hyperlinks that helped users get started and helped them navigate what was then a very small web.
  On 6 August 1991, Berners-Lee posted a short summary of the World Wide Web project on the alt.hypertext newsgroup, inviting collaborators. This date is sometimes confused with the public availability of the first web servers, which had occurred months earlier.
  Paul Kunz from the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) visited CERN in September 1991, and was captivated by the Web. He brought the NeXT software back to SLAC, where librarian Louise Addis adapted it for the VM/CMS operating system on the IBM mainframe as a way to display SLAC's catalog of online documents; this was the first Web server outside of Europe and the first in North America. The www-talk mailing list was started in the same month.
  In 1992 the Computing and Networking Department of CERN, headed by David Williams, did not support Berners-Lee's work. A two-page email sent by Williams stated that the work of Berners-Lee, with the goal of creating a facility to exchange information such as
caption: The NeXTcube used by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN became the first Web server.
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