- Information Management: A Proposal, outlining Tim Berners-Lee's vision for a global hypertext system, is written and circulated at CERN. What would later be dubbed the "World Wide Web" is simply called "Mesh."
- Information Management: A Proposal recirculated at CERN
- Tim Berners-Lee acquires the NeXT computer that will be used for development of the proposed global hypertext system
- Initial development of the first hypertext browser and server by Tim Berners-Lee. The browser program is called "WorldWideWeb," and the hypertext system is now called "World Wide Web."
- A revised version of the proposal is drafted and circulated, with Robert Cailliau joining as an author
- Nicola Pellow begins work on the LineMode portable terminal browser
The first working versions of WorldWideWeb and LineMode are complete
- info.cern.ch is publicly available
- LineMode is released internally at CERN
- The World Wide Web (and both browsers) is announced publicly by Tim Berners-Lee:
- Aug 6th on alt.hypertext
- Aug 6th on alt.hypertext
- Aug 20th on comp.sys.next.announce
- Aug 22nd on comp.text.sgml and comp.mail.multi-media
He writes:
This project is experimental and of course comes without any warranty whatsoever. However, it could start a revolution in information access.
- LineMode 0.11a, the earliest version archived here, is released August 15th
- WorldWideWeb 0.12, the earliest version archived here, is released August 19th
- Dan Connolly announces a working prototype of a graphical browser, but is unable to share it with Tim Berners-Lee and the Web community
- The Web is publicized in CERN Computer Newsletter no. 204
- What may be the first Web server outside of CERN is launched at Stanford SLAC. (That it was first is claimed by Tim Berners-Lee in Weaving the Web (p. 46), but it seems to have been predated at least by the Helsinki University of Technology. SLAC itself claims only that it hosted the first Web server outside of Europe.)
- In a "one nite hack," Pei-Yuan Wei adapts his Viola hypertext system to add WWW browsing capability
- The first version of ViolaWWW is shared with Tim Berners-Lee; it is the first browser for the X Window System
- The first W3 Newsletter is published
- ViolaWWW 2.0.4, the first version archived here, is released (and is reviewed by Tim Berners-Lee, who calls it "a very neat browser useable by anyone: very intuitive and straightforward")
- Erwise 0.1, an X/Motif browser written by a group of Finnish students, is released. (This is its only release.)
- TkWWW 0.1 alpha, Joseph Wang's Tcl/Tk browser and editor, is released. (Editing capability won't appear until version 0.6 alpha in March 1993.)
- Dan Connolly circulates the earliest HTML Document Type Definition (DTD). (He had told Tim Berners-Lee in November 1991, "you need a DTD.")
- VOICE Magazine, the first Web magazine and possibly the first non-academic Web site, publishes its first issue. Tim Berners-Lee notes that the magazine "covers political and moral issues: its first issue is on the topic of abortion rights."
- Tony Johnson's MidasWWW 1.0 for X/Motif is released
- Tom Fine's w3browser, an elegant Perl-based terminal browser, is released. (At CERN, it is referred to as FineWWW, and others called it PerlWWW)
- Jim Whitescarver announces w3, a terminal browser, which also originates the PRE tag
- MacWWW, a.k.a "Samba," the Macintosh browser developed by Robert Cailliau and Nicola Pellow at CERN, is first released in "pre-alpha" form
- The World Wide Web is mentioned in an article in the Vancouver Sun about connecting to the Internet, which calls it "a Swiss-based global information service" -- apparently the Web's first appearance in a major newspaper
- There are 26 reliably available Web servers at this point
- The first announcement and release (0.5) of Marc Andreessen's NCSA Mosaic for X/Motif
- Marc Andreessen "proposes" the IMG tag, which he has already implemented in Mosaic
- Lou Montulli's Lynx 2.0 alpha is released, the first version to incorporate WWW browsing capability. (It had been a Campus Wide Information Service client for the University of Kansas.) Lynx is the oldest continuously maintained browser.
- David Rashty announces his WWW Browser terminal client for VMS systems, based on LineMode 1.4. It is the first browser to support right-to-left text (and Hebrew specifically).
- CERN's directors put the World Wide Web into the public domain on April 30th
- NCSA Mosaic for X 1.0 is released
- MacWWW/Samba 1.00 is released
- Thomas Bruce announces and releases Cello ("Beta Release 0.1"), the first graphical browser for Windows
- Dan Connolly and Tim Berners-Lee publish the first formal HTML draft specification
- NCSA Mosaic for X 2.0, Mosaic for Macintosh 1.0, and Mosaic for Windows 1.0 are released
- The first webcam goes online
- There are over 250 Web servers known to CERN at this point and 623 web sites found by the Wanderer crawler (the Web's first Web robot)
- The Web is covered in the New York Times and The Guardian
- "Jerry's Guide to the World Wide Web," renamed "Yahoo!" in April, goes online (seen here as it was in late 1994)
- The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the body long responsible for Web standards, is founded by Tim Berners-Lee at MIT
- Whitehouse.gov goes online
- The first banner ad appears
- There are, depending on the source, either about 2,500 servers and/or more than 10,000 Web sites by this point.