December 12, 1991

The date the first Web page was shown!

Historical perspective: In December of 1990, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, a CERN computer scientist, finished writing the code for the first browser. With this, he unshackled the Internet from its static, text-only realm and sent it off to a rich world of graphics and sound, and the World Wide Web was born. The "Web" as it is affectionately called, was originally conceived and developed for large, high-energy physics collaborations that have a demand for instantaneous information-sharing between physicists in different universities and institutes all over the world.

Together with Robert Cailliau, Mr. Berners-Lee wrote the first WWW client (a browser-editor running under NeXTStep), the first WWW server, and most of the related communications software, defining URLs, HTTP, and HTML. In December 1993, WWW received the IMA Award, and in 1995, these two men shared the ACM Software System Award, for developing the World Wide Web (along with Marc Andreesen and Eric Bina of the NCSA). FYI, the World Wide Web prototype developed by Sir Tim Berners-Lee was called ENQUIRE. Created in 1980, its name was based on an 1856 book about home economics titled "Enquire Within Upon Everything."