The World Wide Web was developed at the European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva from a proposal by Tim Berners-Lee in 1989. It was created to share research information on nuclear physics. In 1991, the first command line browser was introduced.

By the beginning of 1993, there were 50 Web servers, and the Voila X Window browser provided the first graphical capability for the Web. In that same year, CERN introduced its Macintosh browser, and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) in Chicago introduced the X Window version of Mosaic. Mosaic was a Web browser created by the University of Illinois National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) and released it on the Internet in early 1993. It was the application that caused interest in the World Wide Web to explode. Mosaic was developed by Marc Andreesen who later became world famous when he help found NetScape. Originally developed for UNIX, it was soon ported to Windows. An enhanced version of NCSA Mosaic is offered by Spyglass, Inc., Naperville, IL.

By 1994, there were only approximately 500 Web sites. However, by the start of 1995, nearly 10,000 Websites had gone online. In 1995, more articles were written about the Web than any other subject in the computer field. Today, there are more than 200,000 Web sites with new sites coming online at a staggering rate.