Sir Timothy John Berners-Lee
On April 30, 1993, four years after publishing a proposal for
“an idea of linked information systems,” computer scientist
Tim Berners-Lee (above) released the source code for the
world’s first web browser and editor. Originally called Mesh,
the browser that he dubbed WorldWideWeb became the first
royalty-free, easy-to-use means of browsing the emerging
information network that developed into the internet as we
know it today.
Berners-Lee was a fellow at CERN, the research organization headquartered in Switzerland. Other research institutions like
the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Stanford
University had developed complex systems for internally
sharing information, and Berners-Lee sought a means of
connecting CERN’s system to others.
He outlined a plan for such a network in 1989 and developed
it over the following years. The computer he used, a NeXT
desktop (below) became the world’s first internet server.
Berners-Lee wrote and published the first web page, a
simplistic outline of the WorldWideWeb project, in 1991.