The story behind the World Wide Web

To find out when the World Wide Web began, we first need to look at the internet. The origins of the internet go back to the Space Race of the 1950s.After the Russians sent the satellite Sputnik into space, the Americans wanted to develop their own technology further, so they set up APRA-the Advanced Research Projects Agency. This agency found a way of connecting computers, which they called ARPANET. In 1974, they changed its name ‘the internetwork’ or ‘internet’ for short.

In 1980, a scientist at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, wrote a computer program so that he and his colleagues could share their research. The scientist’s name was Tim Berners-Lee, and his software was called ENQUIRE. At first, only scientists at CERN could use the program, which contained a new computer language called hypertext. Then, in 1991, he and a colleague wrote a more advanced version of the program which made hypertext available over the internet. This was the beginning of the World Wide Web, as we know it. The first website and web server was info.cern.ch. Today, there are more than 227 million websites containing over 65 billion web pages.

Over two billion people now use the internet, which is nearly a third of the world’s population.