Next: Current mechanisms for Up: History and evolution Previous: Background and historical

Origins of the Web

Tim Berners Lee of CERN first proposed the Web in 1989 as a project to facilitate collaboration between high energy physicists, working at different locations throughout the world. He wrote the first Web server and browser programs. Through its links with CERN the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) in Chicago became involved. Marc Andreessen, at the time a graduate student at the NCSA working on visualization software, wrote Mosaic, a graphical Web browser program, for the X Window System. This was released on the Internet in May 1993 and rapidly became very popular. At that time there were approximately 50 Web sites worldwide. During the first year the growth both in the number of Web sites and in the volume of traffic generated by the Web was tremendous. Web traffic is currently more than doubling every three months.

Spinning the Web by Andrew Ford
© 1995 International Thomson Publishing
© 2002 Andrew Ford and Ford & Mason Ltd
Note: this HTML document was generated in December 1994 directly from the LaTeX source files using LaTeX2HTML. It was formatted into our standard page layout using the Template Toolkit. The document is mainly of historical interest as obviously many of the sites mentioned have long since disappeared.