What does www mean and who designed it?

WWW is a legend in a world that cannot think of living without it. It is ‘the universe of network accessible information’, as the W3C or World Wide Web Consortium defines itself. We are used to seeing ‘www’ written before the names of web pages on the address bar of the internet.  

What is the web?  
The World Wide Web is a giant directory of internet addresses, following hypertext protocols set by the internet. It is the hugest internet enabled service we use, even more than email or chat, because sometimes the providers of those services are also ‘web’ sites. In 2014, when WWW turned 25, an estimated 2 out of 5 people on Earth were using it! But how did it all start off?  

How was the web born and who designed it?  
Let’s rewind to 1989. Tim Berners-Lee, a bright young scientist fresh out of Oxford University, was working as a software engineer at CERN, a global Particle Physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland. Scientists from all over the world came to use its facilities, but Tim noticed that they were having difficulty sharing information quickly and efficiently.  

Tim believed he knew the solution, and he also knew it could have much broader applications. The internet, a somewhat new invention, was already connecting millions of computers.  Berners-Lee correctly realised information could be shared by using hypertext, the language of the internet, by making it the language for pages stored on the internet. All these pages, text, images, and any file saved on the internet would have an address according to a common protocol, and this would create the web.  

How was the web launched?  
In March 1989, Tim laid out his ideas in a document called “Information Management: A proposal”. But Mike Sendall, his boss, was not sure about the “vague but exciting” idea. So while he did not approve it as a CERN project, he gave Tim time in September to work on it.  The result was WWW and the first web page editor/browser (“WorldWideWeb.app”) and the first web server (“httpd“). In 1993, the web was opened to the world, and the rest, as we all know, is living history.