On this day in 1900, the World Wide Web was formally proposed by a British scientist at CERN Tim Berners-Lee.
According to CERN, Berners-Lee wrote the first proposal for the World Wide Web [PDF] at CERN in 1989, further refining the proposal with Belgian systems engineer Robert Cailliau. The following year, the pair published a formal proposal outlining principal concepts and defining important terms behind the web.
The browser was released outside CERN in 1991, first to other research institutions starting in January 1991 and to the general public on the Internet in August 1991.
Since 1991, WWW has been the primary tool billions of people use to interact on the Internet, searching for information by moving from one document to another.
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