The web is not the internet
The two words are used interchangeably, but they name different things. The internet is the global network of networks that moves data between computers, using shared rules called protocols. The World Wide Web is one service that runs on top of it: a system of linked pages and resources, each with an address, that you open with a browser. Email, online games, video calls and file transfers also use the internet, but they are not the web.
Keeping this distinction in mind makes the history clearer, because the two have separate origins and the internet is considerably older.
Before the web: building the internet
In the late 1960s, research funded by the United States Department of Defense produced ARPANET, an early network that first connected a few university and research computers in 1969. Over the following years, researchers developed ways to link different networks together. A key step came on 1 January 1983, when ARPANET switched to the TCP/IP set of protocols that still underpin the internet. Through the 1980s, networks in universities and research institutions around the world joined up, and the system of domain names was introduced to replace lists of numeric addresses. The role of those names today is explained in the article on DNS servers.
At this stage the internet was used mostly by academics and technical staff. It had email and file transfer, but no easy way to browse linked documents.
1989 to 1993: the invention of the web
In March 1989, Tim Berners-Lee, a British computer scientist working at CERN, the European particle physics laboratory near Geneva, wrote a proposal for a system to help researchers share and link information. His supervisor reportedly described it as vague but exciting, and he was allowed to continue.
By late 1990, Berners-Lee had built the essential pieces:
- HTML, a markup language for writing pages that can contain links.
- URLs, the addresses that identify each page.
- HTTP, the protocol a browser uses to request pages from a server.
- The first browser, called WorldWideWeb, and the first web server, both running on a NeXT computer.
The first web pages went live at CERN, and the service was announced to a wider audience in 1991. In April 1993, CERN made the underlying web technology available for anyone to use without paying fees, which is widely seen as important for its rapid spread.
1993 to 1995: browsers reach the public
Early browsers were text-heavy or limited to specialists. In 1993, Mosaic, created at the University of Illinois, made it easy to see images alongside text and became popular quickly. Several of its developers went on to work on Netscape Navigator, released in 1994, which brought the web to many more people. Microsoft’s Internet Explorer followed in 1995, and competition between the two browsers shaped the late 1990s.
In 1994, Berners-Lee founded the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) to develop open standards so that the web would not split into incompatible versions. Around the same time, JavaScript appeared in 1995, allowing pages to react to users, and style sheets (CSS), proposed in the mid-1990s, separated how a page looks from what it says.
The way people reached the internet was also changing, with dial-up modems giving way over time to faster broadband. The different kinds of connection are compared in the article on internet connection types.
Late 1990s: search, shopping and the boom
As the number of pages grew, finding anything became the key problem. Directories and early search engines tried to organize the web, and Google, founded in 1998, became known for ranking pages using the links between them. Online shopping, auctions and portals appeared, and investment poured into internet companies.
This enthusiasm ended in the dot-com bust, when many company valuations collapsed between 2000 and 2002. Many companies disappeared, though the underlying technology and several businesses survived and grew.
Mid-2000s: the social and interactive web
Around 2004, the term “Web 2.0” became popular to describe sites where users produced much of the content: blogs, wikis, photo sharing and social networks. Wikipedia launched in 2001, and large social platforms and video sites emerged in the middle of the decade. Pages became more like applications, using background requests to update without reloading.
The same period brought the habits that now raise privacy concerns. Sites began using browser cookies to remember visitors, and advertising networks used similar methods to follow people between sites, a topic explored in the article on online tracking.
2007 onward: phones, apps and the cloud
The launch of the iPhone in 2007 and the spread of smartphones with capable browsers shifted how most people use the web. Many tasks moved into dedicated apps distributed through app stores, built on smartphone operating systems, though many of those apps still rely on web technologies and servers behind the scenes. Sites adapted to small screens, and mobile networks improved with each generation. The latest of these is covered in the article on 5G networks.
At the same time, computing moved into data centres rented over the internet, a model known as cloud computing. Services such as email, documents and photo libraries now run on remote servers, which is the basis of a cloud storage service or a cloud productivity suite. Streaming also became mainstream, with video streaming now accounting for a large share of internet traffic.
HTML5, which became a formal W3C recommendation in 2014, reflected the shift by adding built-in support for audio, video and richer applications, reducing reliance on separate plug-ins. Over the 2010s, encrypted HTTPS connections also became the normal default for most sites, rather than something used only for payments.
Where things stand and open questions
The web today is a mix of an open, link-based system and a set of large platforms that control much of what people see. Debates continue about privacy, the spread of online misinformation, the influence of social media on politics, and who should control personal data. Ideas such as decentralized systems built on blockchain technology have been proposed as alternatives, though their practical effect so far is limited and debated.
A few themes recur throughout the history:
- Open standards helped growth. Allowing anyone to build browsers and sites without permission was central to the web’s spread.
- Each shift changed habits. Search, social media and phones each altered what people expected from the web.
- Hype and correction repeat. Rapid enthusiasm followed by a reset has happened more than once.
Predictions about what comes next are uncertain, and the web has repeatedly developed in ways its early designers did not foresee.