The World Wide Web

The World Wide Web is born as Tim Berners-Lee shows off his concept for implementing hypertext, consisting of cross-linked documents, on the internet. At the time of his demonstration, the net’s primary functions are Gopher, Telnet and Usenet, but as those services do not provide a simple, user-friendly experience for providing amusingly captioned cat pictures to the public, “the web”, also known as “the WWW”, quickly gains traction and prominence. While the internet’s infrastructure can trace its origins to the 1960s and ARPAnet, this marks the dawn of the public-facing internet (which now, of course, includes the site you are reading right now).