Tim

Robert

1990 was a momentous year in world events. In February, Nelson Mandela was

freed after 27 years in prison. In April, the space shuttle Discovery carried

the Hubble Space Telescope into orbit. And in October, Germany was reunified.

Then at the end of 1990, a revolution took place that changed the way we live

today.  CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, is where it all

began in March 1989. A physicist, Tim Berners-Lee, wrote a proposal for

information management showing how information could be transferred easily

over the Internet by using hypertext, the now familiar point-and-click system of

navigating through information. The following year, Robert Cailliau, a systems

engineer, joined.   The idea was to connect hypertext with the Internet and

personal computers, thereby having a single information network to help CERN

physicists share all the computer-stored information at the laboratory. Hypertext

would enable users to browse easily between texts on web pages using links; The

first examples were developed on NeXT computers.  Berners-Lee created a

browser-editor with the goal of developing a tool to make the Web a creative space to share and edit information and build a common hypertext. What should they call

this new browser: The Mine of Information? The Information Mesh? When they

settled on a name in May 1990, it was the World Wide Web (www).