World Wide Web

The World Wide Web was created by Tim Berners Lee in 1989. See www.w3.org

[Tim BL] coined the name, and also implemented HTTP (Hyper Text Transfer Protocol), HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language), URIs (Uniform Resource Identifier), and the first HTTP servers and clients. The story is told in Weaving The Web. You have him (and Ward :-) to thank for the fact that you could even read or edit this page. -- Randy Stafford

Is this a generally accepted fact that Tim not only proposed the formal idea of WWW but also _originated_ it himself? Hadn't there been any work or idea which could be called WWW in some sense, before him? What is the common _academic_ opinion concerning this? -- June Kim

There was tons of work done. In 1987, two years before TBL did anything, the first hypertext conference (with the name 'hypertext' in the conference title) was held, and 29 papers were published. Hypertext had been an idea for two decades by that point. Ted Nelson had convened The Xanadu Group to work on a much, much more sophisticated version of a global hypertext system in 1979. Doug Engelbart demonstrated the hyperlink in The Mother Of All Demos in 1968. What Tim Berners Lee was was a johnny come lately who wrote a hacked up piece of crap that didn't fulfill a fraction of what the original specs for such a system were, but he released it anyways. And that's why it became popular, because he released it.

Yes, released it as opposed to presenting papers about it at "hypertext conferences" for 20 years. See Worse Is Better.