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In building the first web browser at Switzerland's CERN nuclear research lab in the early '90s, the English-born Berners-Lee designed a system where only the technicians behind the scenes would see addresses. The ordinary web user would only see text and hypertext, jumping from page to page without ever typing on a keyboard
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"On the initial design of the web, you didn't see the http:// when you were a user. You just read text and you clicked on links,"Berners-Lee says. " In the original web browser, you had to bring up a special link inspector to see addresses. That's why I wasn't worried about http:// being ugly. No one would really see it."
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As the web grew, this particular vision was lost - at least in part. But you'd have to say that the web still exceeded expectations. In 2010, according to the International Telecommunication Union, close to a third of the world's population was using the web, and after beginning life as a means of merely sharing text. it has evolved into a medium that shares everything from audio to video to entire software applications that in many ways dwarf what you can do on a local machine.
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Cerf and Crocker are just two names on a long list of internet founding fathers. The world can't even agree on when the internet was created. But the web originated with one man. In March 1989, Tim Berners-Lee submitted a proposal to his boss at CERN for a new kinf of "information management" system. His boss called it "vague but interesting," and over the next few years, with additional help from a man named Robert Cailliau and other CERN Researchers, the proposal spawned the Hypertext Transfer Protocol - HTTP, the basis for the world wide web.
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Basically, Berners-Lee took the idea of hypertext and applied it to the transfer control protocol(TCP) and domain naming system (DNS) that already underpinned the internet. At that point in the late '80s, the hypertext idea was a common one. As Berners-Lee points out, it was already part of CD-ROM interfaces and other technologies. "I just had to take the hypertext idea and connect it to the TCP and DNS ideas and - ta-da! - the World Wide Web, "he once wrote.
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