Career and research
Berners-Lee worked as an independent contractor at CERN from June to December 1980.
While in Geneva, he proposed a project based on the concept of hypertext, to
facilitate sharing and updating information among researchers.To demonstrate
it, he built a prototype system named ENQUIRE.
Berners-Lee wrote his proposal in March 1989 and, in 1990,
redistributed it. It then was accepted by his manager, Mike Sendall,
who called his proposals "vague, but exciting". He used similar ideas
to those underlying the ENQUIRE system to create the World Wide Web,
for which he designed and built the first web browser. His software also
functioned as an editor (called WorldWideWeb, running on the NeXTSTEP
operating system), and the first Web server, CERN HTTPd (short for
Hypertext Transfer Protocol daemon).
Berners-Lee published the first web site, which described the
project itself, on 20 December 1990; it was available to the
Internet from the CERN network. The site provided an explanation
of what the World Wide Web was, and how people could use a
browser and set up a web server, as well as how to get
started with your own website. On 6 August 1991,
Berners-Lee first posted, on Usenet, a public invitation
for collaboration with the WorldWideWeb project.
In 1994, Berners-Lee founded the W3C at the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology. The World Wide Web Consortium decided that its standards
should be based on royalty-free technology, so that they easily could
be adopted by anyone.
