1/67.1 World Wide Web history
In 1989, Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau started to think independently about the possibility of using a hypertext system for international cooperation, an idea proposed already by Ted Nelson in his Xanadu project in 1965. Researchers in high energy physics at CERN wanted to share information with each other, but previous attempts had met with many problems due to a range of different network information retrieval protocols. Another problem was the variety of different workstations with widely varying display capabilities.
The first technical breakthrough concerning WWW was achieved by Nicola Pellow, a technical student at CERN. He developed a line mode browser, a character-grid oriented client, in 1991. A year later, the incorporation into the WWW browser of the most important Internet protocols, such as Gopher, Telnet and FTP, was also completed. In 1993, ripples of excitement went through the UNIX world: the first XWindows WWW browser was born. Developed by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), it was a graphical browser called Mosaic and was the first one able to show color images and proportional type fonts. Then, in 1994, perhaps `The year of the Web', the first WWW Conference took place at CERN. From this moment on, the WWW spread over the whole world from the high energy physics community into all areas of academia and then into commercial enterprises and to the general public.