A timeline of the history of the World Wide Web

Key dates, browsers, technologies and ideas in the history of the World Wide Web. Originally compiled by John Allsopp from Web Directions we welcome your suggestions. Just email them to me.

The Mundaneum
Founded by Paul Otlet (who outlined a concept of a globally connected network of computers in 1934) and Henri La Fontaine, The Mundaneum aimed to "gather together all the world's knowledge and classify it according to a system they developed called the Universal Decimal Classification".

The Garden of Forking Paths

First published in 1941, Jorge Luis Borges short story 'The Garden of Forking Paths' is considered to prefigure ideas of hypertext.

As we may think
The Atlantic Monthly publishes the seminal As We May Think by Vannevar Bush, widely considered to be the origin of the idea of HyperText. It imagined a device called the Memex, 'a sort of mechanized private file and library'.

HyperText
Ted Nelson, father of the Xanadu hypermedia system, coins the term HyperText

Markup Language
Charles Goldfarb, co-inventor of the first markup language GML, and designer of SGML, coins the term "markup language"

GML (Generalized Markup Language) developed

At IBM Charles Goldfarb, Ed Mosher and Ray Lorie invent GML at IBM. Widely considered the first modern markup language, and a precursor to languages like SGML, XML, HTML . Goldfarb went on to design SGML and XML. Work began in 1969, the name GML was coined in 1971, and the first public appearance was in May 1973.

SGML
Charles Goldfarb begins work on what will become SGML. HTML until HTML5 is an application of SGML.

RFC 675
The first mention of the term Internet appears in theSpecification of Internet Transmission Control Program, authored by Vinton Cerf, Yogen Dalal and Carl Sunshine.

HyperCard
Apple's hypermedia and programming development toolHyperCard is released.

GIF 87a Introduced

The original image format for the web, the Graphics Interchange Format was originally associated with the online service CompuServe

Perl 1.0 released

Larry Wall releases v 1.0 of the widely used scripting language Perl. Perl has been described as the "Swiss Army knife of the web"

Information Management, a Proposal

Tim Berners-Lee circulates a proposal "concern[ing] the management of general information about accelerators and experiments at CERN". It "discuss[ed] the problems of loss of information about complex evolving systems and derives a solution based on a distributed hypertext system".

World Wide Web the first web browser

Developed by Tim Berners-Lee, famously on a NeXT computer, WorldWideWeb was the the original web browser (and also editor). It was later renamed "Nexus"

HTML Tags
The first publicly available description of HTML, "HTML Tags". It featured several elements still in use today, including headings (level h1 to h6), paragraphs (p), a number of different types of list, and anchor elements with href attributes. It also featured a number of elements no longer part of HTML.

HTTP 0.9
Tim Berners-Lee specifies the HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP) 0.9

The oldest extant web page

The oldest web page continually served was last modified on Tuesday November 13 1990.

Surfing the Net

Brendan Kehoe uses the term 'net-surfing' for the first recorded time

The WWW Project is announced

Newsgroups: alt.hypertext "The WWW project was started to allow high energy physicists to share data, news, and documentation. We are very interested in spreading the web to other areas, and having gateway servers for other data" Tim Berners-Lee

WWW-Talk
Tim Berners-Lee starts the www-talk mailing list to discuss the development of the World Wide Web

Lynx Released
Developed at the University of Kansas, Lynx is a text based web browser. Still in development, it is considered to be "the oldest web browser still in general use".

Line Mode Browser

The second browser after WorldWideWeb, LMB was developed by Tim Berners-Lee, Henrik Frystyk Nielsen and Nicola Pellow at CERN. Platform independent, it ran on a wide number of Operating Systems, and supported FTP, NNTP, as well as HTTP.

Viola WWW Browser released

Considered to be the first popular browser, ViolaWWW, developed by Pei-Yuan Wei. It implemented a style sheet language, viola-style, and a scripting language, both years before CSS and JavaScript.

Mosaic Browser released

Dubbed the killer app for the web, Mosaic was developed at the NCSA at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, originally by Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina for the X Window System UNIX GUI. Mosaic was ported to the Macintosh and Windows Operating Systems.

Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) IETF first Draft

Tim Berners-Lee and Dan Connolly publish the first draft of a specification for HTML. This becomes RFC 1886 Hypertext Markup Language - 2.0 in late 1995

Cello Browser released

The first Windows Browsers, Cello was developed by Thomas R Bruce.

Python 1.0 released

Guido van Rossum releases the 1.0 version of Python, a dynamic language often used on the server side of web applicationW3C Founded Tim Berners-Lee founded the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Laboratory for Computer Science [MIT/LCS] in collaboration with CERN, where the Web originated, with support from DARPA and the European Commission