Conception of the World Wide Web

November 12, 1990

About 2 and a half years after he first submitted a proposal to his employer, CERN, for developing a new way of linking and sharing information at the European research institution, Tim Berners-Lee submits a formal proposal for a hypertext project he calls “WorldWideWeb”. In this proposal he lays out his vision for what will become the modern World Wide Web. By Christmas Day he will have the prototypes of a web server and web browser operational. By the end of February of the next year he will present the project to his colleagues at CERN. By May the first web server will go online internally at CERN. And by August, having realized the potential for his new system on the Internet at large, he will announce the project publicly on the alt.hypertext usenet group along with the first public web server hosted at CERN.