The World Wide Web is just one of the services that utilize the internet. Electronic mail, ftp, and gopher were some of the earlier applications that were used over the internet but never gained massive appeal. It was the Web that created the surge of users online, from a low of 26 web servers in 1992 to more than 200 million in 2009.

Yet, Tim Berners-Lee’ initial proposal for a “large hypertext database with typed links” written some 20 years created little interest. Berners-Lee however was not discouraged by this misstep and with the approval of his supervisor at CERN, Mike Sendall, began developing what later became the World Wide Web on his NeXT computer.

Berners-Lee’s motivation for creating the Web was solving the problem of data sharing among scientists working at CERN who were using different computers running on different operating systems and using different software to view data. At that time, CERN was an organization of more than a thousand talented people whose stay at the facility averaged only two years. Because CERN and the Large Hadron Collider involved so many people, many wondered how to keep track of such a large project.

By late 1990, Berners-Lee already had the system for the Web in place at CERN. His team at CERN devised the HyperText Transfer Protocol; HTML which is the language used in building web pages; a browser called WorldWideWeb; and a web server which was running on his Next computer. The first use of the Web at CERN was for browsing the institution’s phone directory.

In 1991, Paul Kunz, from the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center visited CERN and became acquainted with the Web. Kunz bought a copy of the server software back to SLAC where the librarian at that time, Louise Addis ported it to an IBM mainframe running on VMC/CMS operating system. This is the first documented use of the Web in the United States.

By 1992, the Web was still exclusively used by research institutions and universities. Most web browsers were non-graphical except for the one Berners-Lee developed on the NeXT computer. It was only after a team from the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) created the Mosaic browser that the web’s popularity exploded. Mosaic was the first browser developed by a team of full-time programmers who developed a product easy enough for novices to install and use. But it was Mosaic’s ability to display graphics and play multimedia inline that really started the explosion in web use. Earlier browsers had to open graphics in separate windows and it’s not difficult to imagine how excited users got when Mosaic made it possible to display both text and graphics on the same window. Of course, the fact that Mosaic ran on Windows meant that the millions of users of the operating system will eventually experience the web and not on the clunky way earlier browsers did it.

Another important contribution from NCSA was a web server called NCSA HTTPd. When its lead developer Robert McCool left NCSA in 1994, the development of the server came to a standstill and further development came in the way of patches via email. This is the primary reason attributed how Apache Web Server got its name. Its origin came from a patchy server developed at NCSA. By 2009, more than 100 million Apache servers were used to churn out web pages.

Today, the web is ubiquitous and the population online is greater than most countries worldwide. Web hosting is a 51 billion dollar a year business and is forecasted to reach 73 billion per year in 2014.