History of the Web

Interactive History of the Web

In 1989, Sir Tim Berners-Lee created the World Wide Web.

It has since evolved into being a tool that most of us use every day.

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About

This interactive website explores the history of the web by analysing the most popular websites, technologies and web browsers that have combined to make the World Wide Web what it is now.

Wayback Machine

Fetch and interact with previous versions of websites using the Wayback Machine.

Try it out

Have a go with the client-side technologies available at the time.

Launch

Interact with some classic web browsers and previous versions of the web browsers we use today.

Categories

This website explores the following categories:

Websites

The most popular and influential websites are described with screenshots for each. Fetch and interact with previous versions of websites using the Wayback Machine.

Wayback Machine

Technologies

Take a look at the components that combine to make the world-wide web what it is today. A HTML/CSS/JavaScript text editor with result window is provided so you can see what can be produced with the technologies available at that time.

Try it out

Browsers

The most popular web browsers are looked at with screenshots for each. Access to a virtual machine, so you can see what it was like to use web browsers from the past.

Launch

What is it?

Internet

The Internet is a series of huge computer networks that allows many computers to connect and communicate with each other globally.

World Wide Web

The World Wide Web, not to be mistaken for the Internet, is a global information medium which users can read and write via computers connected to the Internet.

Inventor

The World Wide Web was created by Sir Tim Berners-Lee at CERN in 1989.

How Does it Work?

The World Wide Web uses the following three protocols:

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HTML

HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) is the language that we write our web pages in.

http://

HTTP

HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) is the protocol that requests the HTML document from the server and serves it to the web browser.

www.

URL

URL (Uniform Resource Locator) is the address which indicates where any given document lives on the web.