A Brief History of the Web

Many people use the terms World Wide Web and Internet interchangeably, but they're really two very different things.

The Internet is a global "network of networks," linking

millions of computers that share information via a set of shared software protocols. Other applications, in turn, use the Internet as a communications medium. These include popular services such as email, Internet chat, and the World Wide Web.

The History of the Web
The Web began in 1989, when physicist Tim Berners-Lee envisioned a way for scientists to exchange research papers over the Internet. Berners-Lee wanted a way not only to publish text on the Internet, but also to embed links that could take the reader to other parts of the document or even to documents located elsewhere on the Internet — creating a global "web" of interconnected content.

Berners-Lee's idea wasn't completely original — other researchers had described similar systems as long ago as the 1940s, and by the 1980s applications such as standard generalized markup language (SGML) were using complex sets of hyperlinks to connect documents. But Berners-Lee developed a basic system that didn't require expensive software or advanced programming skills. He invented a basic protocol for publishing documents on the Internet, called hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP), as well as a simple set of commands called hypertext markup language (HTML) that described the structure of a document.