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daily knowledge:
In March of 1989, following the successful introduction of TCP/IP, or as regular people call it, the internet, to the European Council for Nuclear Research, or CERN, a researcher wrote a proposal. His name was Tim Berners-Lee, and he posited that a distributed hypertext system could make information more accessible at the organization. The idea was simple: a system for viewing pages of information through the internet, the words on screen potentially linking to many other pages, each one accessible regardless of what server it’s on.
Working with Robert Cailliau, the proposal was formalized in 1990 while implementation work began soon after. The goals were to create a common, simple protocol for requesting and automatically exchanging human readable information over a network, and to provide software for it “free of charge to anyone.” The importance of allowing a wide range of clients, many systems from many different manufacturers, to connect to it was emphasized.
The project’s name was “WorldWideWeb,” and before long, it gained a motto: “Let’s share what we know.”