In March 1989 Tim Berners-Lee — a scientist working at CERN — submitted a proposal to develop a radical new way of linking and sharing information over the internet. The document was entitled Information Management: A Proposal. It was initially damned with faint praise, his boss Mike Sendall writing “vague but exciting” on the cover. British physicist proposed to develop a way to share information over a computer network. And so the web was born.

The first website in the world was dedicated to World Wide Web. In 1993 CERN put the Web software in the public domain. It was the first example of open-license software for running web server along with a basic browser and a library of code.

It took only seven years from the first web pages in 1991 for the web to be used by a quarter of the American population. It’s important to note that electricity needed 46 years to be used by a large part of US population, 35 years for the phone and 26 years for television.

Between 2005 and 2010, the number of web users doubled, and surpassed two billion in 2010. According to a 2001 study, there were a massive number, over 550 billion, of documents on the Web, mostly in the invisible Web. A study in 2005 determined that there were over 11.5 billion web pages in the publicly indexable web. As of May 2009, over 109.5 million domains operated.