The Social Media Bible: Tactics, Tools, and Strategies for Business Success, 3rd Edition

Back to the Beginning

The very first website, web page, and web server debuted in the latter part of 1990. During March 1989, while working at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva, Switzerland, physicist Sir Timothy John “Tim” Berners-Lee wrote a proposal blueprinting how computers could be connected to easily share information around the world by means of the Internet and the use of HTTP—or Hypertext Transfer Protocol, based on Vannevar Bush’s work in 1945 and TCP/IP, Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (previously created by Vint Cerf). Both HTTP and TCP/IP are the systems used today to navigate across websites and web pages.

Robert Cailliau1 became the staunchest supporter of connecting the Internet, HTTP, TCP/IP, and personal computers by means of creating the largest single information network on the planet. His goal was to help physicists share all of the information stored on each individual computer at the CERN laboratory, and hypertext would allow each user the opportunity to easily browse text on web pages using the HTTP links. The first examples of this were developed on Steve Jobs’s NeXT personal computers.

NeXT Computer

After leaving Apple Computer in 1985, Steve Jobs went on to form a company that he called NeXT Computers—with products that were designed with all the bells and whistles available for computers at the time. This first prototype computer workstation was released in 1988, and had been developed specifically with ...