A formal account explaining how Tim Berners‑Lee developed the first web system and landing page at CERN to enable knowledge sharing, and how the idea evolved into a global infrastructure for linking documents and media.
The Narrative
In late 1989 and early 1990 Tim Berners‑Lee at CERN sought a practical solution to enable scientists to share documents and data across networks, formulating the concepts of URLs, the HTTP protocol, and HTML.
Berners‑Lee created a simple explanatory page on his NeXT workstation that linked related documents and files; this was the first locally hosted website. CERN later released the project publicly, allowing the idea to spread and evolve into a global system connecting text, images, video, and applications.
The work established hypertext linking as a foundation and enabled subsequent protocol and specification development that produced the modern Web. CERN’s decision to make the project publicly accessible was pivotal in transforming an internal experiment into a global infrastructure that continues to shape communication, knowledge sharing, and the digital economy.