Original WWW Proposal

Year First Appeared

1989

Creator

Tim Berners-Lee

Tim Berners‑Lee’s 1989 “Information Management: A Proposal”, written at CERN (date noted May 1990), outlines a distributed hypertext system to organize and share information at CERN, the concept that became the World Wide Web.

Importance in Internet Culture

The memo crystallized the web’s core model, linked documents navigated via a distributed hypertext system, and led directly to the first browser/editor and server at CERN in 1990 and a public release in 1991, seeding the modern web.

Interesting Fact

Berners-Lee initially toyed with calling the project “Information Mesh” (or just “Mesh”) before settling on “World Wide Web.” And when his boss Mike Sendall read the 1989 proposal, he scribbled a verdict on the cover: “Vague, but exciting.”