www @ 30: The story of the web, as told by its creator Sir Tim Berners-Lee

Berners-Lee wrote while the web had created opportunities and made daily lives easier, it had also created an opportunity for scammers, enabled spread of hatred, and made crime easier to commit

The World Wide Web, commonly referred to as www, turned 30 today. Envisaged in the lab of CERN, a large nuclear physics laboratory in Switzerland, the World Wide Web was first introduced as a proposal by Sir Tim Berners-Lee to help his colleagues in CERN share information with different computers. The proposal was initially marked ‘Vague but exciting’ by Berners-Lee’s boss Mike Sendall, who later allowed Berners-Lee to turn the proposal into a working model.

In 1990, Berners-Lee developed three fundamental technologies — HTML, URI (URL), and HTTP — that remain the core of the web as we know it