The Early World Wide Web
Growth of the World Wide Web since 1993 from Hobbes' Internet Timeline
In 1989 Tim Berners-Lee submitted an Information Management proposal to his employer, CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research. This proposal outlined the basics of Hypertext Transport Protocol (HTTP), how a web server should work, how a browser should work, and other details that persist in the modern World Wide Web.
The first web server (circa 1990)
Berners-Lee didn't come up with his idea out of the blue. Since even before Vannevar Bush wrote his essay in 1945, researchers and scientists had sought to create versions of information networks. Notably, Ted Nelson, in 1960, began Project Xanadu, which was to be a network for transmitting and viewing "hypertext" documents. "Hypertext" indicates a document that can be linked to other documents. Nelson coined the phrases "hypertext" and "hypermedia" in 1963, while working on Xanadu.
"Floodgap gopher fun menu". Via Wikipedia
Prior to the development of the World Wide Web there were other networks that allowed linked text and media files to be shared. A notable example is the Gopher) protocol, which was similar to a text-based web (try it in this gopher simulator). Gopher was successful in getting users to begin thinking about vast networks of information, but it was not very visually appealing and as desktop computers moved towards graphical user interfaces it was clearly out of sync with consumer expectations.
In 1993, Mark Andreesen and a group of graduate students at the University of Illinois created Mosaic). Mosaic is generally considered the web browser that popularized the World Wide Web. It had the advantage of supporting multiple protocols (including Gopher) and displaying images inline with text, which made web pages much more impressive to the average user than their all-text counterparts. Mosaic was also ported to many platforms, including Unix, Windows and Macintosh.
Andreesen and some of his team eventually founded Netscape Communications Corporation, which created Netscape, the browser that popularized the World Wide Web. Netscape was extremely popular in the 1990s, but was eventually bested by Internet Explorer in the marketplace. Mosaic and Netscape kicked off the boom that has been the monumental growth of the World Wide Web, which has not only cemented the technology in our day-to-day toolkit, but has changed the way that we interact with each other, our government, and everyone else in the world.