1. A system of Internet servers that support specially fo
rmatted documents. The documents are formatted in a
markup language called HTML (HyperText Markup
Language) that supports links to other documents, as
well as graphics, audio, and video files. This means you
can jump from one document to another simply
by clicking on hot spots. Not all Internet servers are
part of the World Wide Web.
There are several applications called Web
browsers that make it easy to access the World Wide
Web; Two of the most popular being Firefox and
Microsoft's Internet Explorer.
The World Wide Web (or the proper World-Wide Web;
abbreviated as WWW or W3, and commonly known as the
Web) is a system of interlinked hypertext documents
accessed via the Internet. With a web browser, one can
view web pages that may contain text, images, videos, and
other multimedia and navigate between them via hyperlinks.

2. 1958
The U.S. Department of Defense
launched the Advanced Research
Projects Agency (ARPA) which
developed a rudimentary Internet in the
1960's - what the WWW rides on. It's
interesting to note that ARPA came
about due to perceived threats relating
to the Cold War. This Department of
Defense project would evolve into
ARPANET in the years to come and be
made accessible to all.

3. 1960s
Leonard Kleinrock at MIT publishes
the first paper on packet switching
theory in July 1961. Douglas
Engelbart developed NLS - an online
hyperlinking system - and also
invented the mouse; an essential tool
that wouldn't gain popularity until
nearly 20 years later. Ted Nelson
coins the term "hypertext".

4. 1970s
Ray Tomlinson developed the first
electronic mail system. Bob Kahn and
Vint Cerf develop the TCP/IP
networking protocols which are still
the workhorses of the Internet
today. Ethernet was also developed
during this decade.
The first spam message was sent by
a DEC marketing representative to a
slew of ARPANET addresses in 1978.

5. 1980s
The Domain Name System (DNS) was
introduced in 1984. DNS translates
domain names into IP addresses and vice
versa. It was also in 1984 that Apple
launched the first personal computer.
Fidonet, the first dialup network to
connect personal computers, was
established in 1983.
Tim Berners-Lee published a paper call
Information Management: A
Proposal, that detailed how the World
Wide Web would operate in 1989. He
creates a hyperlinked database system
for use in connecting databases across a
closed network.

6. 1990
Berners-Lee coined the World
Wide Web term. It was actually
the name of the browser he
created. The first Web server
and Web page at nxoc01.cern.ch
was also trialed late that year;
but it was only accessible via
invitation. nxoc01.cern.ch was
later renamed
to info.cern.ch, which is still
active today.

7. 1991
Berners-Lee web server and browser was
made publicly accessible after making
this announcement and other servers
began appearing around the world.
1992
By the end of 1992, there were
about 26 publicly accessible sites
available on the World Wide web.
Surfing the Internet" is coined by
Jean Armour Polly.

8. 1993
Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina release
the first version of the Mosaic
browser. This is the first browser to
support the display of images.
The first image based banner ad is also
sold during this year by Global Net
Navigator (GNN) which was the first
commercially supported web
publication. HotWired soon follows by
selling a banner ad placement on their
site.

9. 1994
The world's first search engines, Web Crawler
and Lycos, are launched. Jerry Yang and David
Filo publish "Jerry's Guide to the World Wide
Web" online, which will evolve into Yahoo. The
first version of Netscape Navigator is also
released.
The first secure ecommerce transaction is
reported to have occurred Aug. 11, 1994. The
product was the CD "Ten Summoner's Tales"
by Sting. The Fraunhofer Society release the
first software MP3 encoder called l3enc.
The first banner ad appears on HotWired.com

10. Tim Berners-Lee
Sir Timothy John "Tim" Berners-Lee, (born 8 June 1955), also
known as "TimBL", is a British computer scientist, MIT professor
and the inventor of the World Wide Web. He made a proposal
for an information management system in March 1989 and on
25 December 1990, with the help of Robert Cailliau and a young
student at CERN, he implemented the first successful
communication between a Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP)
client and server via the Internet.
In the process of developing, he developed three essential
technologies:
a system of globally unique identifiers for resources on the Web and
elsewhere, the Universal Document Identifier (UDI), later known
as Uniform Resource Locator (URL) and Uniform Resource
Identifier (URI);
the publishing language HyperText Markup Language (HTML);
the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP)

11. Robert Cailliau
-> most well-known for the
proposal, developed with Tim
Berners-Lee, of
a hypertext system for
accessing
documentation, which
eventually led to the creation of
the World Wide Web.