World Wide Web

6 August 1991: a post on alt.hypertext

On 6 August 1991, Tim Berners-Lee posted information about the WorldWideWeb project to the public Usenet newsgroup alt.hypertext and invited broad collaboration. Alongside the post, he made project files available over the Internet by FTP — extending access beyond CERN and the high-energy-physics community.

The package included Web software and documentation for a system that was already real: a browser, a server and a project website were operating at CERN by August 1991, and the project website had existed there since the end of 1990.

What this date is — and the two it gets confused with

6 August was the public announcement, not the creation: the project page explaining the Web, hypertext and how to create a server had existed at CERN since the end of 1990. Nor was this the invention of the Internet — the Web is an information system built on it, and 'WorldWideWeb' named both the project and, initially, Berners-Lee's browser-editor.

What the day itself delivered

The day's concrete actions were the post, the invitation and the files: software and documentation sat on CERN's FTP site for anyone on the Internet to retrieve, and collaboration was explicitly invited.

Interest began spreading beyond CERN, and the first Web server outside Europe came online at SLAC in California in December 1991.