NCSA Mosaic ran on Windows computers, was easy to use, and gave anyone with a PC access to early web pages, chat rooms, and image libraries. It was the very first popular web browser and the early ancestor of Mozilla Firefox. That year, Mosaic was created at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign by computer scientist Marc Andreessen. Everyone needed new computer programs to access it. Universities, governments, and private corporations all saw opportunity in the open internet.

For the first time, text documents were linked together over a public network-the web as we know it.Ī year later, Berners-Lee asked CERN math student Nicola Pellow to write the Line Mode Browser, a program for basic computer terminals.īy 1993, the web exploded. He called his new window into the internet “WorldWideWeb.” It was an easy-to-use graphical interface created for the NeXT computer. Web Eraīritish computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee created the first web server and graphical web browser in 1990 while working at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, in Switzerland. The real open internet, and the first web browser, wasn’t created until 1990.

There were dozens of programs that could trade information over telephone lines, but none of them were easy to use. It was restricted to university and government researchers, students, and private corporations. But for the next 20 years, the internet wasn’t accessible to the public. New networks formed, connecting universities and research centers across the globe.

That sparked a revolution in computer networking. Governments and universities across the globe thought it would be great if the machines could talk, nurturing collaboration and scientific breakthroughs.ĪRPANET was the first successful networking project and in 1969 the first message was sent from the computer science lab at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) to Stanford Research Institute (SRI), also in California. But progress was swift, and by 1960 they were able to run complex programs. In 1950, computers took up whole rooms and were dumber than today’s pocket calculators.

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