The triumphant advance of the World Wide Web began at Cern in Geneva. Not so long ago, the Internet was a closed book, used by a handful of computer geeks. Only a few universities and research institutes had access. If you wanted to retrieve a document from the Internet, you had to know exactly which computer it was stored on. To download documents, you also had to have the same type of computer and the same software. This was not practical for the general public. At the beginning of the 1990s, only around 200,000 computers worldwide were connected to the Internet. Today, almost 3.5 billion people use it, almost half of the world's population.
Geneva as the birthplace of the WWW
A decisive catalyst for this success story was a common "language" with which computers connected to the Internet could communicate and exchange data. This language - the Hypertext Transfer Protocol, HTTP for short - goes back to the British physicist and computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee. From 1989, he worked at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva on a global information management system that would simplify data exchange. He received support from his colleague Robert Cailliau. The Internet, developed by the military in the 1970s, was to be made available to a wider audience. However, Berners-Lee did not yet have private users in mind, but primarily the research community. Berners-Lee initially called his project "Mesh". However, the name was quickly discarded as it was too reminiscent of "Mess". In the end, he settled on "World Wide Web", although he was warned by colleagues that the tongue-twisting abbreviation WWW would jeopardize the success of the project. However, "web" seemed particularly appropriate as an image, as in mathematics it describes a network of nodes, each of which can be connected to any other.
Step into the public eye
After two years of development, the time had finally come on August 6, 1991. Tim Berners-Lee published a description of his "World Wide Web" project in various newsgroups on the Internet. The post explained how interested parties could download the browser he had developed and suggested that they visit Berners-Lee's first website. Although this had already been launched the year before, it was only with Berners-Lee's digital invitation that it became accessible outside Cern for the first time. It explained how the Hypertext Transfer Protocol worked, how the Internet could be searched for information and provided a guide to programming your own websites. The site also included so-called hypertext links, digital cross-references to other documents. The necessary page description language HTML was also developed by Berners-Lee. In this way, users could easily be redirected from one document to another. All they had to do was click on the link on the first page displayed by the browser. This took you to another page that you may not even have known about: "surfing" was born.
Mosaic brings the breakthrough
In April 1993, Cern laid the foundations for the success of Burners-Lee's invention with an important formal act. The institute released the web to the public and waived license payments or patenting. The triumphant advance of the World Wide Web in the mid-1990s then took place primarily in the USA. The browser "Mosaic", developed by Marc Andreessen in 1993, a student at the time, helped the WWW to gain popularity far beyond the circle of physicists and computer scientists. Mosaic, a forerunner of the "Netscape" program, was also suitable for non-experts and was also able to display text with graphics for the first time. By the end of 1994, ten million people worldwide were already surfing the web. For Microsoft founder Bill Gates, the WWW was still "just hype" at the time. However, the software giant soon recognized the Internet as a strategic field - and from 1995, Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser was automatically installed on computers with its software. (Lorenzo Bonati/SDA)