The Digital Century

How the Web Was Spun

It might seem as though the World Wide Web burst on the scene fully realized in the mid-1990s, but it was a long time abornin'. In 1945 a government scientist named Vannevar Bush theorized about a futuristic communications device that he dubbed a memex, which in retrospect sounds amazingly like a browser-equipped PC. In 1960, Ted Nelson, the father of hypertext, conceived a Weblike information network called Project Xanadu (a project he's still working on today). And of course, the Web sits atop the infrastructure established by the ARPAnet in 1969.

But the Web really got going in March 1989, when Tim Berners-Lee, a British software engineer at the European Laboratory for Particle Physics in Geneva, devised a system that would allow the lab's researchers to share disparate documents in hyperlinked, browsable form. By 1992, his project--dubbed the World Wide Web--had begun to catch on among the Internet's then-exclusive populace of scientists and researchers. Among its fans was Marc Andreessen, an undergrad with a job at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. In 1993, working with NCSA programmer Eric Bina, Andreessen designed a highly graphical point-and-click browser, named NCSA Mosaic. The Web's popularity began to skyrocket--especially after Andreessen and Bina joined a start-up called Netscape in 1994 and spearheaded the creation of an even better browser, known as Navigator.

How fast has the Web grown? Put it this way: It took five years for the number of servers on the Web to go from 0 to around 1500. Another five years later, the number of servers has surpassed 7 million, and the figure keeps growing.

--Harry McCracken