The internet is not the web
People often use “the internet” and “the web” as if they were one thing, but they are different. The internet is the global system of connected networks that moves data between computers using shared rules called protocols. The World Wide Web is a service that runs on top of the internet: a collection of linked documents and resources that you reach with a browser. Email, file transfer and many messaging systems also use the internet but are not part of the web. The title of this article uses the phrase “first internet”, but the story told here is the early web. The history of the network itself is in our timeline of internet networking.
The idea at CERN
The web began at CERN, the European particle physics laboratory near Geneva. In 1989, Tim Berners-Lee, a software engineer working there, wrote a proposal for a system to help researchers share information across different computers. Staff and visiting scientists came and went, and documents were scattered across incompatible machines, so finding things was hard.
His proposal drew on the existing idea of hypertext, in which pieces of text are linked to one another. By around 1990 he and colleagues had defined the basic pieces that still define the web: a way to name resources with addresses (now called URLs), a protocol for requesting them (HTTP), and a markup language for writing pages (HTML). He also wrote the first browser and the first server software. Early versions ran on a NeXT computer at CERN.
Opening it up
Information about the project was posted publicly in 1991, and the first servers outside CERN soon appeared. In 1993, CERN announced that the underlying web software could be used freely by anyone, without fees. Historians often cite this decision as an important reason the web grew so fast, because anyone could build on it without negotiating permission.
Early browsers were mostly text-based, or ran only on specific workstations. In 1993, the Mosaic browser, developed at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications in Illinois, was easy to install and could show images inline with text. That made pages look more like magazines, and interest grew quickly. Companies founded by some of its developers released commercial browsers in the mid-1990s, and large technology firms also entered the field. The period of intense competition between browsers that followed is sometimes called the browser wars.
What the first pages looked like
Early websites were simple. Typical pages were plain text with headings, lists and links in a default font and blue underlined link color. Many were created by researchers and universities to share papers, lab information or software. Soon people began making personal home pages, hobby sites, fan pages and online guest books, often with flashing banners and animated images.
Because there was no way to know what existed, people relied on human-curated directories and lists of links. Automated search tools soon appeared, which crawled pages and built indexes. Their evolution into the modern search engines is a story of its own; the idea was to help readers find a page among a fast-growing number of sites.
How people got online
In the early and mid 1990s, many individuals reached the web through a modem connected to an ordinary telephone line. The connection was slow, so pages with large images loaded noticeably slowly, and a dial-up connection could tie up the household phone. Others used university or workplace networks, which were faster. Commercial internet service providers and online services made access available to the public, and by the late 1990s, the web was becoming part of ordinary life in many countries, although access differed greatly between regions.
Commerce, communities and change
Businesses soon recognized that the web could reach customers. Online shopping, advertising and banking sites emerged in the mid-1990s. Questions about payment safety brought attention to encryption basics, such as the use of secure connections for card details. Discussion groups, forums and early blogs made it a place for communities.
Technical changes helped the web become more dynamic. Style sheets separated appearance from content. Scripting languages in the browser allowed pages to respond to users. Over time, sites moved from static documents to applications, and the web became a platform for software as well as pages, a shift which later supported cloud computing services.
Limits and lessons
The early web had real limitations. Pages could be hard to find, connections were slow, there was little built-in security, and many people had no access. The same open design that allowed rapid growth also made it difficult to control spam and misleading content, topics that remain relevant today in discussions of online privacy and online misinformation.
Still, the early web showed the power of simple, open standards. A short proposal for sharing physics documents became a layer on the internet that billions of people use. Remembering that the web is only one application among many on the internet helps explain why the network underneath continues to carry new services long after the first browsers were retired.