The World Wide Web has become 25 years old. In 1989 a British scientist, Tim Berners-Lee tried to find a way to get computers around the world to communicate with each other. At first, Berners-Lee wanted to give scientists and researchers a way to share their information. He came up with a concept that could connect documents: the World Wide Web was born. It was an invention that revolutionized our world the way no other one has. Lee’s first computer, from which he accessed others, is still on display in London.
At that time the Internet had already been in existence for twenty years. However, even though data could be sent around the world there was no way of looking at documents that were stored on other computers.

Berners-Lee started out by writing a code that would determine how information could be exchanged and stored on computers. This became known as the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP). HTML was the new language that computers used to show their documents to other people. These documents had to be stored on servers that could be accessed from around the globe. By 1993 there were more than 500 web servers worldwide. Only a few million people had access to the web. Today, almost 2 billion people are connected to the World Wide Web.
Software companies quickly started to develop programs with which you could read these documents, so-called browsers. Towards the middle of the 1990s Netscape Navigator dominated the browser market and became the first browser to be used on a wide scale. It all but disappeared when Microsoft started supplying the Internet Explorer with its operating system Windows for free.  Today, Google has taken over the browser market with its free browser Chrome.
Nowadays, almost all people in developed countries have access to the Internet. But there are many countries in Africa and Asia where only a fraction of the population can use the World Wide Web regularly.