On August 6, 1991, in a little-known newsgroup—an early, primitive version of an Internet forum—called alt.hypertext, a soon-to-be-famous computer scientist posted something that would change the landscape of technology. – and the world – as we knew it. It was in response to a question from one of his nerdy newsgroup friends who asked if anyone knew of development efforts in the form of “hypertext links that enable retrieval from multiple heterogeneous sources of information?” In other words, could the early internet become easier to join and navigate?
Tim Berners-Lee, a British computer scientist at CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research), used that forum to announce his new initiative to the world, writing: “The WorldWideWeb (WWW) project aims to allow connections to any information everywhere. The address format includes an access method (=namespace), and for most namespaces a hostname and a path type.” Before Berners-Lee’s new idea, surfing the Internet required knowing specific protocols like Telnet or FTP to connect to other servers, which did not have friendly names like popsci.com, but mysterious computer names that did not could be easily detected. Online discussions included participation in message-based bulletin board systems enabled by services such as Usenet or CompuServe. In his post, Berners-Lee even included one of the first URLs, or Uniform Resource Locators, in his newsgroup post, where you can find more information: http://info.cern.ch/ hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html (link still works).
With this, the World Wide Web made its debut. Later, an October 1998 Popular science The technology update acknowledged the anniversary of the Web, noting that “the use of the Internet is about the growing popularity of one part of the Web – the World Wide Web.” The article included early Internet user statistics such as “77 percent of all Web users are between the ages of 18 and 49″ and 10 million people in the US had shopped online during the first quarter of 1998. It noted ” portals” such as Yahoo, advertising services such as “personalized news”. With more than 2.6 million web pages already available in 1998, the Web had arrived. Seven years ago, it was still the brainchild of a computer scientist.
Berners-Lee had first proposed his idea to his supervisor at CERN, Mike Sendall, more than two years before the prophetic post, in March 1989. But Sendall’s response had been lukewarm. According to the World Wide Web Foundation, CERN never funded the project, although until September 1990, Sendall gave Berners-Lee time to work independently.
In the August 6 post, Berners-Lee shared information about the progress of the WorldWideWeb project and invited collaboration, explaining the basic concepts behind the web, such as HTML, HTTP, and web browsers that could access and display stored documents on servers. Although the August 6 post is celebrated for announcing the World Wide Web, it is worth noting that Berners-Lee also described the principles of Open Source. He offered his code for free, encouraged others to “hack it” and made all his documentation and data available. “Welcome colleagues!” he wrote.
In 1993, the release of the Mosaic web browser (written by Marc Andreessen) democratized Internet access, providing a graphical user interface that made the Internet more accessible by converting text-based requests into dot-and- click. The subsequent introduction of Netscape Navigator (also Andreessen) further accelerated engagement. As noted by Popular science, by the late 1990s, the Internet—via the Web—had begun to influence commerce, media, and personal communication. It can be said that today’s great social media sensations like Facebook, Instagram and TikTok can trace their roots to a humble newsgroup post written in a crude monospace font on August 6, 1991.