It is unlikely Sir Tim Berners-Lee, an Oxford University graduate, knew the power the web would wield when he first presented his proposal on March 12, 1989.
On the web's 25th birthday, here is a history of its early years.
- March 1989: Information Management: A Proposal written by Tim Berners-Lee and circulated for comments at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research, CERN.
- October 1990: Sir Tim starts work on a hypertext GUI browser+editor using the NeXTStep development environment. He makes up "WorldWideWeb" as a name for the programme and project. The machine on which he created the first webpage was NeXT Cube which is on show at the Science Museum in London this autumn as part of its Information Age exhibition.
- August 1991: Web software made available on the Internet via File Transfe Protocol (FTP).
- May 1992: Pei Wei's "Viola" GUI browser for X test version.
- February 1993: National Centre for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) releases first alpha version of Marc Andreessen's "Mosaic for X".
- April 1993: CERN's declares that WWW technology would be freely usable by anyone, with no fees being payable to CERN.
- May 1994: First International WWW Conference at CERN in Geneva.
- October 1994: World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) founded.
