The web and HTTP

The internet existed for twenty years before the web. It carried email, file transfers and remote logins, but finding information meant knowing exactly which machine held it and how to ask.

In March 1989 Tim Berners-Lee, working at CERN, wrote a proposal for a distributed information system. By Christmas 1990 he had the first browser-editor and the first web server running on a NeXT computer, at the address info.cern.ch. On 6 August 1991 he announced the software on the alt.hypertext newsgroup.

Then CERN made the decision that let it spread. On 30 April 1993 it issued a statement putting the web software into the public domain. Anyone could build on it, free.