The World Wide Web (WWW):
A Brief Overview and Historical Context

The phrase "World Wide Web" first appeared in a formal document on March 12, 1989, when Tim Berners-Lee, a physicist at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland, submitted a proposal titled "Information Management: A Proposal" to his supervisor, Mike Sendall. Written at CERN's Meyrin facility near the Swiss-French border, this internal memo outlined a hypertext system to manage the sprawling data of particle physics experiments. Berners-Lee didn't use "World Wide Web" in the title, but within the text, he described "a large hypertext database with typed links," envisioning a "web" of interconnected documents accessible globally via networked computers. He later refined this in a May 1990 revision, co-authored with Robert Cailliau, explicitly naming it "WorldWideWeb" (one word then), though the March '89 draft marks the conceptual debut. Berners-Lee, influenced by Ted Nelson's 1960s "hypertext" ideas and DARPANET's reach, coined it at CERN's labs - specifically Building 31 - where he coded the first web server on a NeXT computer by December 1990. The earliest public mention came on August 6, 1991, when he posted about it on the alt.hypertext Usenet group, but that '89 CERN memo is the genesis.

The term "Internet," however, predates this by over a decade, with its first known reference tied to December 1974 in a technical document co-authored by Vinton Cerf, Robert Kahn, and Yogen Dalal. This was RFC 675, titled "Specification of Internet Transmission Control Program," published under the auspices of Stanford University's Digital Systems Laboratory in Palo Alto, California, where Cerf worked as an assistant professor. Written while Cerf was at Stanford and Kahn was at Bolt, Beranek and Newman (BBN) in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the RFC formalized the Transmission Control Program (TCP), which split into TCP/IP by 1978. The document used "Internet" (capitalized) to describe "a collection of interconnected networks," specifically DARPANET and its peers like ARPANET's Packet Radio Network, envisioned as a unified system via gateways. Cerf credits a casual remark from a DARPA meeting in Arlington, Virginia, earlier in 1974 - "We're going to internetwork these things" - as the spark, but RFC 675, drafted in Stanford's labs, is the earliest preserved usage. It built on DARPANET's 1969 origins and Paul Baran's 1964 RAND packet-switching papers, cementing "Internet" as a term by the time TCP/IP launched on January 1, 1983.

So, "World Wide Web" debuted on March 12, 1989, in Berners-Lee's CERN proposal in Geneva, Switzerland, while "Internet" first hit paper in December 1974 via RFC 675, penned at Stanford University, California, with roots in Arlington and Cambridge.

This content was generated by primarily with the assistance of ChatGPT (OpenAI), and/or Gemini (Google), and/or Arya (GabAI), and/or Grok (x.AI), and/or DeepSeek artificial intelligence (AI) engines. Review was performed to help detect and correct any inaccuracies; however, you are encouraged to verify the information yourself if it will be used for critical applications. In all cases, multiple solicitations to the AI engine(s) was(were) used to assimilate final content. Images and external hyperlinks have also been added occasionally - especially on extensive treatises. Courts have ruled that AI-generated content is not subject to copyright restrictions, but since I modify them, everything here is protected by RF Cafe copyright. Many of the images are likewise generated and modified. Your use of this data implies an agreement to hold totally harmless Kirt Blattenberger, RF Cafe, and any and all of its assigns. Thank you. Here is Gab AI in an iFrame.

AI Technical Trustability Update

While working on an update to my RF Cafe Espresso Engineering Workbook project to add a couple calculators about FM sidebands (available soon). The good news is that AI provided excellent VBA code to generate a set of Bessel function plots. The bad news is when I asked for a table showing at which modulation indices sidebands 0 (carrier) through 5 vanish, none of the agents got it right. Some were really bad. The AI agents typically explain their reason and method correctly, then go on to produces bad results. Even after pointing out errors, subsequent results are still wrong. I do a lot of AI work and see this often, even with subscribing to professional versions. I ultimately generated the table myself. There is going to be a lot of inaccurate information out there based on unverified AI queries, so beware.

Electronics & High Tech Companies | Electronics & Tech Publications | Electronics & Tech Pioneers | Electronics & Tech Principles | Tech Standards Groups & Industry Associations | Societal Influences on Technology