  Tim Berners-Lee. Credit: Fabian Bachrach. Courtesy of the W3C. |
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In 1980, while working as an independent contractor for CERN, the world's largest particle physics laboratory, TimBL -- as he's frequently referred to by friends and fans -- conceived of and devised ENQUIRE, a closed, cross-linking database that permitted collaboration and relied on bidirectional hyperlinking to connect database elements located in multiple nodes on a network. ENQUIRE formed a foundation and knowledge base for his development of the World Wide Web.
In 1989, Berners-Lee began to devise a more formal and ambitious proposal. His goal was to find a way to harness the power of the Internet to publish and update hypertext documents. Again, this theory was aimed squarely at academia and research. More modern notions of the Web -- self-expression, entertainment, sex -- weren't even on his radar. He put this theory into action on a powerful NeXT workstation, and the foundation of the Web was born.
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 Introduction WWW: Past, Present, And Future• Beginnings • The Web Debuts • Better Browsers, New Media • E-Commerce And Search • Self-Expression Ascendant Browser Wars: The Saga Continues The Skinny On Web 2.0 WWW Pop-Up Timeline Browser Image Gallery |
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By August of 1991, Berners-Lee had created the very first Web browser and editor, named WorldWideWeb, as well as world's first server: nxoc01.cern.ch, later renamed info.cern.ch. In an entirely appropriate first real-world usage for this new medium, the WorldWideWeb crew placed the CERN telephone directory on the server for easy access.
Berners-Lee and his partners began proselytizing the gospel of WWW to the masses. "The WWW project," he explained on the newsgroup alt.hypertext, "was started to allow high energy physicists to share data, news, and documentation. We are very interested in spreading the web to other areas, and having gateway servers for other data. Collaborators welcome!"
 Tim Berners-Lee's WorldWideWeb browser/editor was built for the NeXT platform. Courtesy of the W3C. Click image to enlarge and to launch image gallery. |
According to Tim Bray, a search engine pioneer who is currently Director of Web Technologies for Sun Microsystems, the success of the World Wide Web is largely due to the elegant simplicity of its design. "The Web is one of the best examples ever of using the 80/20 sweet spot...The ideas of hypertext links and accessing information were already there, thanks to Ted Nelson," Bray said. "But it was complex. In Nelson's theories, hypertext links never broke and had a bunch of meta-data attached to them. With WWW, we took ideas like this from the past, but we simplified them."
In real-world terms, this emphasis on simplicity resulted in basic URLs with single documents and no meta-data attached to them. It resulted in a radically simplified and accessible language format -- HTML -- instead of the complex programming languages familiar to computers users at the time.
