World Wide Web
The World Wide Web, also known as the WWW and the Web, is an information space where documents and other web resources are identified by Uniform Resource Locators (URLs), interlinked by hypertext links, and accessible via the Internet. English scientist Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web in 1989. He wrote the first web browser in 1990 while employed at CERN near Geneva, Switzerland. The browser was released outside CERN in 1991, first to other research institutions starting in January 1991 and to the general public on the Internet in August 1991.
Ian Ritchie (entrepreneur)
In late 1990, Ritchie met Tim Berners-Lee at a computer fair in Paris. It was there that Berners-Lee told him about a system he and his team at CERN were developing, which with the aid of computer terminals, would enable its staff to view and edit the vast amounts of information the facility was generating and storing in hypertext documents. He said the system could be scaled-up for use worldwide, and would enable users of computers connected to the Internet to access, edit and share documents in the same way too - he called this new system the World Wide Web. Thinking this sounded a bit pretentious, not to mention a mouthful to pronounce, Ritchie convinced himself it would not come to much and duly rejected the idea as a viable business proposition. From that day on HTML and HTTP remained free and non-proprietary. Over the next few years, the number of web sites online grew from 1 in 1991, to over 1 billion by 2014. From its humble beginnings, the web grew into the enormous global communications and commercial system it is today.