World Wide Web started at CERN

Tim Berners-Lee, Robert Cailliau and other founding fathers of the World Wide Web travelled to the CERN laboratories in Switzerland on March 13 to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the original Web proposal. Berners-Lee was working at the CERN laboratory in 1989 trying to coordinate a myriad researchers in different countries who were working on the particle accelerator. He saw the potential of having the scientists’ computers able to talk to each other, and came up with the three key software codes HTTP, HTML and URL from October to December of 1990. He posted the first Web page on Christmas Day 1990.

When Berners-Lee later grew concerned about companies like Microsoft creating their own competing networks, he persuaded CERN to release all of his source code under a general licence so that any programmer could use it for free and no one company could control the Web.– source Scientific American magazine.