Some Web History

The World Wide Web was originally developed in 1990 at CERN, the European Laboratory for Particle Physics. It is now managed by The World Wide Web Consortium.

The WWW Consortium is funded by a large number of corporate members, including AT&T, Adobe Systems, Inc., Microsoft Corporation and Sun Microsystems, Inc. Its purpose is to promote the growth of the Web by developing technical specifications and reference software that will be freely available to everyone. The Consortium is run by MIT with INRIA (The French National Institute for Research in Computer Science) acting as European host, in collaboration with CERN.

The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, was instrumental in the development of early graphical software utilizing the World Wide Web features created by CERN. NCSA focuses on improving the productivity of researchers by providing software for scientific modeling, analysis, and visualization. The World Wide Web was an obvious way to fulfill that mission. NCSA Mosaic, one of the earliest web browsers, was distributed free to the public. It led directly to the phenomenal growth of the World Wide Web.