Science

25 years ago the Web was born (pictures)

The Web we all stare at endlessly today looks nothing like the one Tim Berners-Lee first proposed in 1989. Take a look at some hardware, software, and schematics from the early years.

James Martin

James Martin is the Managing Editor of Photography at CNET. His photos capture technology's impact on society - from the widening wealth gap in San Francisco, to the European refugee crisis and Rwanda's efforts to improve health care. From the technology pioneers of Google and Facebook, photographing Apple's Steve Jobs and Tim Cook, Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg and Google's Sundar Pichai, to the most groundbreaking launches at Apple and NASA, his is a dream job for any documentary photography and journalist with a love for technology. Exhibited widely, syndicated and reprinted thousands of times over the years, James follows the people and places behind the technology changing our world, bringing their stories and ideas to life.

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James Martin

March 11, 2014 5:51 a.m. PT

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The Web: A proposal

In March 1989, Tim Berners-Lee wrote the first proposal for the World Wide Web at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, in Geneva, Switzerland.

Titled "Information Management: A Proposal", the document opened with this statement: "This proposal concerns the management of general information about accelerators and experiments at CERN. It discusses the problems of loss of information about complex evolving systems and derives a solution based on a distributed hypertext system."

The proposal, submitted on March 13, built on ideas that Berners-Lee had been working on with Belgian systems engineer Robert Cailliau. Outlining the central concepts and defining terms behind the Web, the document described a "hypertext project" called "WorldWideWeb" in which a "web" of "hypertext documents" could be viewed by "browsers."

None of this technical jargon may sound especially sexy, but today, this system has come to touch nearly every part of our lives. Here's a look at how the Web got started.

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Berners-Lee and the Web in 1994

This is Tim Berners-Lee, pictured at CERN in 1994 with the Next computer that he used to invent the World Wide Web.

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Berners-Lee's original schematic

Also included in the Web proposal: Berners-Lee's original schematic for a client/server model for a distributed hypertext system.

4 of 12 Patrice Loïez

First Web server

The world's first Web site and server, Info.cern.ch, went live at CERN on December 20, 1990. The server ran on Berners-Lee's Next computer at CERN.

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WorldWideWeb browser

This screenshot was taken from a Next computer running Berners-Lee's original WorldWideWeb browser. The browser was also a Web editor, but it only ran on the NextStep operating system

6 of 12 Stephen Shankland/CNET

Do not switch off

This is a close-up of the hand-written note on the side of the first Web server alerting staff not to switch it off. The original Next computer is still on display at the Microcosm exhibit at CERN.

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CERN systems engineer Robert Cailliau

CERN systems engineer Robert Cailliau, pictured here in 1995, was Berners-Lee's first partner on the World Wide Web project.

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Berners-Lee and Nicola Pellow

Shown here in 1991 with Berners-Lee and a Next computer is Nicola Pellow, who wrote the original line-mode browser for the Web. The simple browser -- which could show only 24 rows of 80 characters -- worked with a wide variety of computers and terminals.

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W3 software release

This document from April 30, 1993, officially put the World Wide into the public domain, according to CERN. The term "W3" didn't catch on, but within a few year, the Web certainly did, and the rest was history.