World Wide Web
The World Wide Web is the leading information retrieval service of the Internet — a system of hyperlinked documents written in HTML, addressed by URLs and delivered by HTTP. British scientist Tim Berners-Lee invented it at CERN in 1989; by the end of 1990 the first web server and browser were running on a NeXT computer, and the world's first website went live at info.cern.ch. On 30 April 1993 CERN put the Web software in the public domain, a decision that allowed the web to flourish. The World Wide Web Consortium, founded in 1994, develops the Web's royalty-free open standards; the Internet the Web runs on now reaches an estimated 6 billion people (ITU, 2025).