The Day the Internet Changed Everything: A Brief History of the World Wide Web

The internet and the web are often conflated, but they're distinct. The internet — a global network of computers — had existed since the 1960s, emerging from the US military's ARPANET project. It could move data between computers, but navigating it required technical expertise.

What Berners-Lee invented was a layer on top of the internet: a system of hyperlinks, URLs, and HTML that made information accessible to anyone with a browser.

The first website went live on August 6, 1991. It explained what the World Wide Web was. It is still online today.

The Cambrian Explosion

What happened next was unprecedented. Within a decade, the web had spawned an entirely new economy, new forms of communication, new industries, and new modes of human relationship.

By 1995, Amazon was selling books. By 1998, Google was organizing the web's contents. By 2004, social networking was beginning to reshape how humans present themselves to one another.

The web didn't just change what we do. It changed what we think is possible.

What We're Still Figuring Out

Berners-Lee himself has become one of the web's most vocal critics. In 2018, on the web's 29th birthday, he wrote an open letter expressing concern about its concentration of power, misinformation, and loss of privacy.

He has spent recent years working on a project called Solid — an attempt to rebuild the web's architecture around individual data ownership.

The inventor trying to fix his invention. Some stories don't have clean endings.