Most people have no idea who invented the World Wide Web, and most think that the World Wide Web and the Internet are the same thing. However the Internet was a project of the US Defense Department from the 60s, but was nothing like the World Wide Web. The Internet was primarily used by research and government institutions for communication and sending messages, and sharing documents.
Tim Berners-Lee, a graduate of MIT, was working for CERN Laboratories in the early 1990s when he conceived a better way of sharing information on the Internet. If a researcher wanted to view a document from another institution, they had to download the entire document and open it in its respective program. Tim thought it would be better to have the document formatted in such a way where it could be viewed directly on the Internet without having to download the entire document, and have the abilityto click on a word in the document to go to a new document. To achieve this, Tim invented HTML to format the documents and the web browser to view the documents in. The next page shows the plaque which is displayed in the CERN Laboratory marking where the World Wide Web began.