TECHNOLOGY × SOCIETY

The World Wide Web

1991 CE

History · Contemporary · Holocene · Meghalayan

At CERN, a physics laboratory, Tim Berners-Lee married two things that already existed, the internet and hypertext, into a third: a universal space of linked documents, with an address for everything. He proposed it in 1989 and announced it to the world in August 1991. The web ran on three simple inventions, URLs, HTTP and HTML, and on one institutional decision that mattered as much: in 1993 CERN put the software into the public domain, free for anyone to use.

Why it matters

The web moved humanity's knowledge, commerce and conversation into one shared, searchable place within a generation, the largest change in how information reaches people since printing. Its inventor's own worry belongs here: universality, decentralisation and open access are not laws of nature but choices, defended or lost one decision at a time. The lineage from clay tablet to hyperlink runs through this timeline, and this is its latest chapter.

Dating & uncertainty

Tim Berners-Lee proposed the system at CERN in March 1989, had the first site running by the end of 1990, and announced the project publicly in August 1991, the date anchored here. In April 1993, CERN put the software into the public domain, the renunciation that let the web belong to everyone.

Sources

1. Berners-Lee (2010), Scientific American · Long live the webdoi:10.1038/scientificamerican1210-80
2. van den Heuvel & Rayward (2017), Routledge · Building society, constructing knowledge, weaving the webdoi:10.4324/9781315580951-8
3. CERN · The birth of the World Wide Web. Institutional source: CERN Science pages, accessed 2026-08-30.

Our species’ history as one day

23:59:509.6 s before midnight

if the 315,000 years of Homo sapiens were compressed into a single day