The information problem
At CERN, thousands of scientists worked with different computers, and documents were hard to find. Berners-Lee proposed a system of documents linked together, which could be opened from any computer over the internet. His boss is said to have noted on the proposal: "Vague but exciting."
Three inventions
By the end of 1990 he had everything in place: URLs, the HTML language for writing pages, and the HTTP protocol for transmitting them. On a NeXT computer ran the first server and the first browser, which could also edit pages.
The web for everyone
In April 1993 CERN released the web technology free of royalties. Had the web been patented, there might today be several paid networks instead of one web. In 1994 Berners-Lee founded the W3C consortium, which still manages web standards today.