This time, thanks to other developments in computer science, Berners-Lee was able to create something that would become remarkably useful: the World Wide Web. Seeing that the problem of information management at CERN had not been solved since his last stint at the institute, Berners-Lee set out to solve it once again. The idea died when Berners-Lee left CERN but was revived when he came back in 1989. But this program ran on CERN's proprietary operating system, which means few people were able to really access it and use it. Enquire helped address this by creating files that could easily be found and linked to one another using hypertext. Up until this point, information was stored on many different computers, making it incredibly difficult to find things unless you knew exactly where to look. The program was designed to make it easier for the many different people working at CERN to share information. In the early 1980s, a British scientist named Tim Berners-Lee, while working at the Swiss-based European Organization of Nuclear Research (known as CERN for its letters in French), created a computer program called Enquire. It laid the groundwork for not only the web browser but also the term "internet."īy the 1980s, researchers were getting very close to creating this "internet" that would make a truly global network possible, setting the stage for the invention of the browser and the beginning of a new era. In the 1970s, the term " internetworking" was used to describe the purpose of creating a common internet protocol that would make it easier for computers to read information from other networks. This severely limited their functionality and became a focus of the entire group working on these projects. The main issue was that the many different research teams working on these networks were creating separate networks that couldn't communicate with one another. Computer scientists continued to build on the idea of creating computer networks that would help these devices communicate with one another over long distances. Throughout the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, Cold War fear began dying down. During the 1950s (the beginning of the Cold War), people were convinced these means of communication were unreliable because they could be attacked and wiped out, which just means that the internet, an era-defining tool, was in part rooted in people's paranoia about commies. This means we can trace the origin of the browser to the early days of the internet, which many people do not know takes us all the way back to the 1950s.Īt this point, the internet was a defense project with the primary objective of creating a communications network that would allow people to communicate without using phone lines. While the web browser as we know it today didn't come onto the scene until around 1990, it had been in the making for several decades, albeit indirectly, as part of the overall effort to develop the internet. This makes it interesting and important to study web browsers' history, the computer programs that serve as the building blocks for our modern age. Today, the browser remains every bit as relevant in fact, many people have come to associate the internet and their web browser as the same thing (which they're not). This is because it was the web browser that helped take the internet out of the academic world and into the mainstream, and once people got a taste of its power, they couldn't stop, leading to a full-on revolution.
How this transformation started and how it is playing out today is a fascinating story that helps us piece together the world we live in.Įmbedded in the story of how the internet changed our lives forever is the history of the web browser. Now, we often struggle to comprehend life without them. To grasp this, consider that just one hundred years ago, essential parts of our daily lives – smartphones, computers, the internet – were beyond even the most creative imagination. Like these other technologies, it has ushered in societal change, but unlike them, this change has been almost instant, and it has had a profound impact on nearly every aspect of our lives. It would not be absurd to say that of all inventions ever created by humankind – the wheel, the steam engine, the light bulb, and so on – the most significant is the internet.
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