August 6th 1991 is seen as the public birth of the world wide web. That is the day Tim Berners-Lee posted a message to the alt.hypertext newsgroup about this new "thing" he was working on in response to someones question... and the rest is history.

In article <1991Aug2.115241@ardor.enet.dec.com> kannan@ardor.enet.dec.com (Nari
Kannan) writes:
>
> Is anyone reading this newsgroup aware of research or development efforts
in
> the
> following areas:
>
> 1. Hypertext links enabling retrieval from multiple heterogeneous sources
of
> information?

The WorldWideWeb (WWW) project aims to allow links to be made to any
information anywhere. The address format includes an access method
(=namespace), and for most name spaces a hostname and some sort of path.

We have a prototype hypertext editor for the NeXT, and a browser for line mode
terminals which runs on almost anything. These can access files either locally,
NFS mounted, or via anonymous FTP. They can also go out using a simple protocol
(HTTP) to a server which interprets some other data and returns equivalent
hypertext files. For example, we have a server running on our mainframe
(http://cernvm.cern.ch/FIND in WWW syntax) which makes all the CERN computer
center documentation available. The HTTP protocol allows for a keyword search
on an index, which generates a list of matching documents as annother virtual
hypertext document.

If you're interested in using the code, mail me. It's very prototype, but
available by anonymous FTP from info.cern.ch. It's copyright CERN but free
distribution and use is not normally a problem.