1991

In 1991 the World Wide Web or WWW in short starts its triumph across the internet. It is released by CERN, a European organisation for nuclear research.
WWW already originated in 1989 as a project at CERN in Geneva, where Tim Berners-Lee developed the hypertext-system. The original intention of this system was to find a simple way to exchange results of the latest research with colleagues.

Tim Berners-Lee

One method was the linking of dissertations and scientific papers; the creation of a web. Berners-Lee once said: “The World Wide Web (W3) is a wide-area hypermedia information retrieval initiative aiming to give universal access to a large universe of documents.”The concept of hypertext originated in earlier developments, such as Ted Nelson’s Xanadu project, Vannevar Bush’s idea of the “memex” machine and the Note Code project. However, the World Wide Web differs from former hypertext-systems. It only needed unidirectional instead of bidirectional links, so everybody is able to set a link to a resource, whose owner doesn’t need to interfere. Furthermore, in contrast to other protocols like HyperCard or Gopher, the World Wide Web is based on an open protocol, enabling the development of servers and clients without limitations due to licenses. During the fall of 1990 Tim Berners-Lee wrote his first web browser, which by then could only display texts.