History

The World Wide Web began in 1989 as a Hypertext information management system at the European Laboratory for Particle Physics. Its creator, Tim Berners-Lee, set out to design a system to make information easier to find and maintain. That system has grown from a small internal network to reach its full potential of a world wide hypertext system with millions of computers all over the world linking to one another.

The growth of the web exploded in 1993 with the release of the Mosaic web browser from NCSA. Freely available for Windows, Macintosh, and Unix platforms, Mosaic put an easy-to-use graphical front-end on the previously text-based Internet environment. Prior to Mosaic, most Internet applications were text-only and required users to know somewhat cryptic commands to perform common tasks. The new graphical interface made the Internet available and attractive to thousands of users that considered the previous applications too difficult to use.

With the growing number of users being exposed to the Internet, many commercial ventures began to take advantage of this new industry. Netscape Communications Corporation developed the first commercial web browser in 1994 named Netscape Navigator. This browser, commonly referred to as Netscape, supported all the features found in Mosaic as well as new features that for the most part became adopted as web standards. Netscape had great success with their browser. That success, along with the growth of the web, inspired Microsoft to release its own web browser, Internet Explorer, in 1995. Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer became competitors, each striving to out do the other with new and improved web browser features. Both browsers implemented non-standard features that resulted in compatibility problems for web site developers attempting to support the browsers. In an effort to solve these compatibility problems, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which was formed in October 1994, took on the role of leading the development of web standards to ensure interoperability.

Today the web is still growing with new standards emerging and over 3 million web sites[16] that provide users with the ability to shop online, buy and sell stocks, perform online banking, obtain the latest news headlines, and find information about almost any topic imaginable. All this and more can be done from a home or office personal computer running a web browser connected to the Internet.