25 years ago the Web was born (pictures)

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 which 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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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 only show 24 rows of 80 characters -- worked with a wide variety of computers and terminals.

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 years, the Web certainly did, and the rest was history.

Page 2 of the World Wide Web public domain document which released the software out into the wild, dated April 30, 1993.

Tim Berners-Lee at an IEEE meet-up at SXSW Interactive in 2013.

As part of the project to restore the first Web site, CERN reinstated the world's first site to its original address in 2013.