Web History

• The web was initially conceived and created by Tim Berners-Lee, a computer specialist from the European Particle Physics Laboratory (CERN) in 1989.

• In his words, there was "a need for a collaborative knowledge- sharing tool" to support scientific work in an international context.

• He and his partner Robert Cailliau created a prototype web for CERN and released it to the Internet community for testing and comments.

  The web is not synonymous with the Internet, though some people may think so. Actually, the web is one way to utilize the infrastructure of the Internet. In other words, the web is a application of the Internet.

• Since then it has grown into the web we know today under the guidance of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) that is a volunteer organization based at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) with the responsibility for developing and maintaining common standards.

• Perhaps the single most important technological development in the history of the web, besides the creation of the web itself, was the development of graphical browsers in the early 90s. Beginning with NCSA's Mosaic and its evolution into Netscape's Navigator and Microsoft's Internet Explorer, these programs allowed users to browse the resources on the web in an extremely user friendly environment. This made the web a "fun" place and marked the beginning of the true web revolution.