History

The World Wide Web (WWW) was created in 1989 by CERN physicist Tim Berners-Lee.[2] On 30 April 1993, CERN announced that the World Wide Web would be free to use for anyone.[3] Before the introduction of HTML and HTTP, other protocols such as file transfer protocol and the gopher protocol were used to retrieve individual files from a server. These protocols offer a simple directory structure which the user navigates and chooses files to download. Documents were most often presented as plain text files without formatting or were encoded in word processor formats.