The web

In 1989 Tim Berners-Lee, at CERN in Switzerland, proposes a way to link documents across the internet with addresses and hyperlinks. In 1991 the World Wide Web opens to people outside CERN. The web is not the internet. The internet already connected computers. The web is an agreement about how to name a page and how to jump to another.

The contribution is a pile of public text and, soon, pictures. Search engines index it. Social networks add personal data. The learning systems of the 2010s train on what this pile contains. Without a common way to publish, that training set does not gather in one place.

Berners-Lee's first browser and server are simple. Mosaic in 1993 makes it visual enough for non-specialists. Companies follow. The protocol, not any one site, is the invention.

The card spans 1989 to 1991 because the proposal and the public release are both the start, and neither is the modern web.