Since the late 1960s, the internet had been growing as a network of computer networks tied together for academic and military research. The information inside it, however, was fragmented, format-incompatible, and hard to reach without specialist tools. In March 1989, computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee at CERN — the European laboratory for particle physics — submitted a proposal to his manager: a hypertext system to interlink the lab's scattered documents.

The project was accepted in 1990 under the name "World Wide Web." Within a year Berners-Lee defined and implemented three building blocks together: HTML (the structure of pages), HTTP (the transfer of pages), and the URL (a universal address for every page). On 20 December 1990, the world's first web page (info.cern.ch) and first web server ran on the same CERN NeXT computer, which served simultaneously as host and as the first browser. On 30 April 1993, CERN released the web's technology to the public, royalty-free — a decision that became the decisive reason for its global spread.

Unlike older internet services such as email, FTP, or Usenet, the web was bidirectional from the start: users not only read, they wrote and linked. By late 1993 the Mosaic browser added inline images and the web spilled out of technical circles. Within a decade there were billions of pages; within two, the web had become the new ground floor for social networks, commerce, education, science, and politics.

Hypertext was not an entirely new idea — Vannevar Bush's 1945 Memex sketch and Ted Nelson's Xanadu project from the 1960s are direct predecessors. The web's success lay not in concept but in simplicity and openness: anyone could publish a link without asking permission.