On August 6, 1991, a young British scientist named Tim Berners-Lee clicked publish on a plain text page at the CERN physics lab in Switzerland. It had no pictures, no animations, no ads, just words and a few blue links. That page explained a new invention he had been building called the World Wide Web, and clicking it open made it the very first website on Earth.
Tim had spent two years writing the rules behind it: HTML to format pages, HTTP to send them between computers, and URLs to give every page a unique address. His boss had described his original proposal as 'vague but exciting,' which turned out to be the understatement of the century. Tim could have patented his idea and become one of the richest people alive. Instead he gave it away to the world for free, because he believed information should belong to everyone.
From that one quiet page, the web exploded. Within a few years there were millions of sites, then billions. Search engines, online shopping, video streaming, social media, video calls, school assignments, multiplayer games - every single thing you do on the internet traces back to that little page Tim Berners-Lee posted on a summer day in 1991. The original page is still online, kept alive by CERN as a kind of digital museum exhibit, the seed from which the entire web grew.
