History & Early Development

The World Wide Web was born in the late 1980s and rapidly expanded throughout the 1990s, evolving from simple text pages to more interactive sites. Below is an overview of the Web's early history, from its inception to the end of the 20th century.

The Origins of the Web

In 1989, a British scientist named Tim Berners-Lee proposed a new way for researchers to easily share information at CERN, a research center in Switzerland. He developed the first version of the World Wide Web, which included the idea of web pages written in HTML (HyperText Markup Language) and linked by clickable hyperlinks. By 1991, the first website was live, and people could access linked documents from any computer connected to the Internet (Owen, 2014).

When the Web first started, the pages were very basic – mostly just plain text with hyperlinks to jump between pages. There were no fancy layouts or images early on. As the concept gained interest, however, new software was created to browse these pages. In 1993, the Mosaic web browser became one of the first popular browsers, allowing users to see images inline with text for the first time. This was a big step in making the Web more user-friendly for the public.

Growth of the Web in the 1990s

As the Web entered the mid-1990s, it started to grow exponentially. New web browsers like Netscape Navigator and Microsoft Internet Explorer emerged and became widely used, bringing the Web to millions of people (Computer History Museum, n.d.). These browsers built upon the foundations that Berners-Lee created, relying on HTML for content and HTTP for communication.

Websites also became more engaging during this period. Developers gradually added more features and visuals to web pages. For example, by the late 1990s, people could fill out forms on web pages and even play simple online games. New technologies like CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) were introduced to handle the visual design, and JavaScript was added to make pages more interactive. Regular users could not only read information but also start doing things like writing blog posts and customizing their MySpace pages. The late 1990s set the stage for an even more interactive Web in the next decade.

Timeline of Early Web Milestones