1989 Tim Berners-Lee created a proposal for the management of information concerning the complex systems being developed at CERN. He stated it was "an attempt to persuade CERN management that a global hypertext system was in CERN's interests." The proposal helped allow people to start developing what later became the World Wide Web.

A diagram from Tim Berners-Lee's proposal.

The proposal describes how hypertext documents could be connected together, creating a "web".

1990 The first web server was up at CERN, running off of a NeXT computer (pictured below). The page https://info.cern.ch/ was up and running (and is still running today). It contains information about the World Wide Web and technical information on how to start a web server and hypertext. Berners-Lee also released the World Wide Web browser, which was the first web browser and could only be used on NeXT brand machines. With the website and browser, Berners-Lee was able to demonstrate the utility of a World Wide Web.

A replica of the NeXT computer the first web server was running on.

1991 In a Californian particle physics laboratory, the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, the first web server in the United States came online. On December 12th, Terry Hung, Paul Kunz and Louise Addis started the first web server outside of Europe. At a CERN Web workshop in Southern France, Tim Berners-Lee demonstrated the power of the Web by connecting to SLAC's Web page from across the sea.

A diagram from Tim Berners-Lee's proposal.

1992 In January, Berners-Lee released a type of web browser called line mode browser, this was a pretty big deal for a number of reasons. The only Web Browser that had existed up to that point was the World Wide Web browser, which could only run on certain brand computers. The line mode browser was able to run on non-NeXT brand computers, allowing even more people to start using the Web. Throughout the year, people kept making more and more browsers, such as ViolaWWW which was the first Web browser to allow stylesheets, metadata, and scripting. A few other browsers were MidasWWW, TkWWW, and Erwise. By the end of the year, there were 26 Web servers (that were reliably available) up and running.

1993 On January 23rd, the NCSA Mosaic web browser was released. It was the most robust of all of the browsers that had been released up to that point. It was developed by the NCSA (National Center for Supercomputing Applications). People attribute the beginning of the dot-com bubble of the 90's to the Mosaic browser. In April, CERN announced that WWW technology was going to be able to be used by anyone, without fees. In October there were over 200 http servers in the World Wide Web. In mid-1993, a specification for Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) was published as an Internet Draft by the IETF. Rasmus Lerdorf begins developing PHP, not initially meaning to be made into its own language.

1994 From May 25th through the 27th, the first International WWW Conference takes place at CERN's Geneva branch. Over 800 people applied to enter, and only 400 were allowed in. In June, M. Bangemann made a report for the European Commission Information Superhighway plan, which was a document registering over 1500 web servers. In September the second International WWW Conference took place in Chicago with a theme of "Mosaic and the Web", this time with 2000 people wanting to get in and with only 1300 people able to fit in the building. Later in the year, Berners-Lee left CERN to join MIT and found the International World Wide Web Consortium. The first W3C meeting took place at M.I.T in Cambridge on December 14th. On the 16th, CERN decided to discontinue WWW development, in order to work on the Large Hadron Collider, and passed it on to the INRIA (Institut National pour la Recherche en Informatique et Automatique) in France.

Closing panel of the First International World-Wide-Web Conference

The IETF formed an HTML Working Group, which updated the draft from the previous year.

1995 In April, the third International WWW Conference was held in Darmstadt, Germany with the focus of "Tools and Applications". In December, the fourth WWWC was held in Boston, Texas wit the theme "The Web Revolution". Apache and Microsoft release their own web servers. The first formal specification for HTML 2.0 was published in November by the IETF. JavaScript was created by Brendan Eich. The release document for PHP, "Personal Home Page Tools (PHP Tools) version 1.0", was posted to the Usenet forums on June 8th.

1996 The Keio University of Japan became the second W3C host. Javascript increases in popularity. In March 1996, Microsoft announced their ActiveX set of web technologies, including Extended HTML, One interface for all types of pages, and much more. Microsoft also released their own version of JavaScript, "Jscript", which was a reverse-engineered version of JavaScript. Windows integrates Internet Explorer 3.0 into Windows, increasing the accessibility of the internet.

Keio University in Minato, Tokyo, circa 1950.

The W3C Recommendation for Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) was published in December. Netscape 2 was released with JavaScript 1.0. In August, FutureWave Software released an animation tool called FutureSplash Animator. In December, the tool was changed from FutureSplash Animator to Flash Animator.

1997 Netscape introduced their new ECMAScript, which was an attempt at standardising the programming language "Java" made by Sun Microsystems. They also announced at their third developer conference that they would be using Sun's JavaBeans, which was made up of blocks of Java that could be put inside of web applications. PHP 2.0 was released. The publications of HTML 3.2 and HTML 4.0 were released DHTML, a combination of HTML, JavaScript, and CSS, was being worked on as a way to dynamically change elements without reloading the page.

1998 The open-source web organization Mozilla, was released in March by Netscape. On November 24th, America Online (AOL) announced they would buy Netscape for $4.2 Billion. Microsoft was involved in an antitrust lawsuit for three years, starting in May. WaSP (The Web Standards Project) was launched in August by a group of independent web developers as a result of browsers solely working on proprietary features and ignoring the implementation of standards. CSS 2.0 was released. The first DOM specification was released on July 20th 1998.

1999 By the end of 1999, Internet Explorer was used by 80% of all people using the net. Internet Explorer 5.0 was released in March. Netscape released a collection of "milestone" updates to Mozilla throughout the year, causing people to start looking back towards Mozilla. The publication of HTML 4.01 was released.

2000 Google releases Google AdWords, a system that allows companies to post ads on Google. By the end of 2000, there were 72,398,092 internet hosts and 9,950,491 websites, a truly massive amount of sites when compared to just 10 years prior. Almost half of the U.S. population accessed information through the internet. The W3C recommendation XHTML 1.0 was released.