For the source of the concept, Nelson quotes an essay by Vannevar Bush written in 1945 and read to him by his father as a boy: "The human mind . . . operates by association. With one item in its grasp, it snaps instantly to the next that is suggested by the association of thoughts, in accordance with some intricate web of trails carried by the cells of the brain." Projecting this idea from a single human brain to a global ganglion, Nelson sowed the conceptual seeds of the World Wide Web. [1]
Tim Berners-Lee wrote the first Web clients and server and defined the URL, HTTP and HTML specifications in the NeXTStep environment at CERN, the European Particle Physics Laboratory which is on the Swiss-French border near Geneva. (The acronym CERN comes from the earlier French title: "Conseil Europeen pour la Recherche Nucleaire") In 1989, he and Robert Cailliau proposed a global networked Hypertext project for High-Energy Physics collaborations to be known as the World Wide Web. This work was started in October 1990, and the program "WorldWideWeb" was made available within CERN in December, and on the Internet at large in the summer of 1991.
In November 1993, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois released NCSA Mosaic(tm), a software tool that, for the first time, enabled people to easily browse the thousands of different types of documents proliferating on the Internet.[2]
Tim Berners-Lee alone could not burst open the Internet pinata and give it to the world. As Richard Wiggins, author of Internet for Everyone: A Guide for Users and Providers, observes, "During 1992 and early 1993, graphical Gopher clients for the Macintosh and Windows evolved, and it appeared that Gopher would outstrip the fledgling Web." It was the ultimate broadband booster, Marc Andreessen, working with NCSA colleague Eric Bina, who ignited the Web rocket. One late December night in 1992 at the Espresso Royale cafe in Champaign-Urbana, Andreessen looked his friend Eric Bina in the eye and said: "Let's go for it."[1]