Communication · 1991

World Wide Web

Tim Berners-Lee's links, URLs and HTML turn the internet into a universal library.

Proposed at CERN in 1989, the web went public in August 1991 with HTTP, HTML and URLs, and CERN released it royalty-free in 1993. Internet users grew from a few million to about 5.5 billion by 2024, reshaping commerce, science and daily life.

See it in the living tree Wikipedia

Arcs above join it to what it stood on, arcs below to what it led to. The bar places this stretch on the tree's whole timeline.

What it built on 4

Domain Name System 1983
Personal computer 1977
TCP/IP 1974
Hypertext 1965

What it led to 10

Mosaic web browser 1993
SSL/TLS encryption 1995
Web search (Google PageRank) 1998
3G mobile data 2001
Wikipedia 2001
Social networking (Facebook) 2004
Online video (YouTube) 2005
Cloud computing 2006
Smartphone 2007
ImageNet 2009

Watch

A brief history of the World Wide WebCERN · YouTube

Related measurements

The dashed line marks when it first worked.

Internet users in the United States Latest: 322M people (2024) Source: Our World in Data

Share of people online Latest: 73.6 % (2025) Source: Our World in Data

Fixed broadband subscriptions per 100 people Latest: 20.1 per 100 people (2025) Source: Our World in Data