2003-06-30: the World Wide Web was invented by Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau in 1990. In 1989, while working at CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research), both men made proposals for hypertext systems. In 1990 they joined forces and wrote a joint proposal in which the term "World Wide Web" is used for the first time (originally without spaces). And in late 1990 and early 1991, Tim Berners-Lee wrote the first web browser.

Berners-Lee went on to found the World Wide Web Consortium, which seeks to standardize and improve World Wide Web-related things such as the HTML markup language in which web pages are written. Cailliau also made ongoing contributions to the Web. Robert Cailliau's a 1995 speech, "A Short History of the Web," is an excellent resource for those who want to understand the history in more detail.

ITim Berners-Lee invented both the HTML markup language and the HTTP protocol used to request and transmit web pages between web servers and web browsers.

For more information, see why was the World Wide Web invented, where was the World Wide Web invented and what was the first web browser?

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