Who Invented the Worldwide Web? - Is It Important to Remember?

For many, who invented the Worldwide Web will be a question of little importance. The use of the Worldwide Web to access the Internet has become homogenised by our Western culture, which now utilises it as another marketing tool to encourage businesses to flourish. Therefore, web agency professionals are often employed as Internet marketers to try to influence web users’ buying decisions, browsing habits and time and money spent online.

Love it or loath it, the World Wide Web is here to stay for the foreseeable future and for those that embrace it daily into their lives, remembering who invented this way of accessing the incredibly diverse range of information on the Internet will no doubt have been forgotten, if indeed ever known in some cases.

However, spare a thought for Tim Berners-Lee (TBL), the British computer scientist credited with inventing the World Wide Web in 1989. His vision of a protocol through which a network of computers could be connected to enable information exchange could arguably be described as the single most important invention of the late 20th Century.

Today, whilst many people won’t be concerned with asking who invented the World Wide Web, they will be familiar with website addresses, dot coms and the ever present three Ws. And, whilst the Web has become a vast and competitive marketplace in addition to being a channel for research and discovery, the original intentions of TBL should never be forgotten.

TBL produced his World Wide Web proposal for his then employers, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN), outlining how the World Wide Web could work using his hypertext protocol (HTTP) to access the Internet through a browser. This was accepted and the first website address and server was set-up. At the time, the key benefits for this would be the giving nuclear physicists and researchers the ability to share knowledge and information easily and simply. It now seems that these primary objectives of research and development for the Worldwide Web are a distant memory.

Who invented the Worldwide Web? – Yes, it’s an important question to answer to enable future users, developers and web agency professionals to understand the principles behind its invention. TBL continues to promote these principles by his involvement in organisations such as World Wide Web Foundation which aims to ‘advance the web to empower people’ – staying true to the vision he originally imagined over twenty years ago.

No-one expects the development of the World Wide Web to remain static, and TBL himself is keen to promote its use in new and exciting ways. However, perhaps it does all Internet users, online businesses and web agency professionals a little good to remember those original objectives once in a while?