Development

Tim Berners-Lee was an English contracter at CERN in Switzerand. In 1980 he built Enquire which was a personal database of people and software models, but also experimenting with HTTP. In Enquire, pages were linked together, like an internet browser. However, it was more like a wiki.

In 1984, Tim Berners-Lee went back to CERN with physicists from around the world to share data on information presentation. In March 1989, he wrote a proposal for a hypertext database with typed links, but however it created very little interest.

His boss Mike Sendal encouraged Tim to start to implement his system on a "Next" workstation. After considering many names, including "Information Mesh" and "Mine of Information", he settled on calling it the World Wide Web.

Robert Cailliau was an enthusiatic collaborator and he rewrote Tim's proposal and they both gave there ideas to the European conference on Hypertext Technology in September 1990, but found nobody who would share there vision of implementing hypertext with the internet.