Before the Web was the Internet. Creation of the Internet is generally agreed to have happened over Labor Day weekend (Sept. 1-2) in 1969. While the Internet had already achieved a sort of international status in the 1970s, the World Wide Web did not even have a working model until late in 1990.

Tim Berners-Lee imagined a global web of links.

In that year, Tim Berners-Lee, working at CERN Laboratory for particle physics in Switzerland, began working on a hypertext system to manage project documentation at the laboratory.

Berners-Lee described his vision this way: “I wanted the act of adding a new link to be trivial; if it was, then a web of links could spread evenly across the globe.”

While Berners-Lee had a working World Wide Web client program by the end of 1990, he had a difficult time getting people of authority to pay attention to his project.

Across the Atlantic, his World Wide Web program had competition from a system developed at the University of Minnesota – Gopher.

Gopher was the first Internet browsing program to gain widespread acceptance. Its computer source code was released to the public in December of 1991, and much of the Internet-savvy world at the time quickly embraced this program. Gopher neatly organized information into hierarchical menus and simplified Internet navigation by automatically making remote connections, logging in, and retrieving data.

Still, all this was the exclusive domain of the denizens of darkened rooms lit by flickering computer screens.

Until 1993.

Three watershed events came together in 1993 to lay the groundwork for World Wide Web adoption by the masses.

1. Public attention was focused on the Internet when newly inaugurated U.S. Vice President Al Gore announced a federal program called the National Information Infrastructure (NII) in June of 1993. By fall, all three major U.S. weekly news magazines had published cover articles about the Internet.
2. As part of the NII, development of the Internet opened to commercial interests. Before this time, the Net was built mostly with NSF funding, and commercial activity over the Internet was forbidden. In less than two years the first waves of the dot-com bubble were underway.
3. The “killer application” was unveiled and given to the public. Teams headed by Marc Andreessen at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) in Illinois released “Mosaic,” an Internet browser for ordinary desktop computers that put a graphical, point-and-click interface on the Net.

So it happened that the Internet had been around a quarter century before the World Wide Web began to get public notice. The rest of the Internet is still in place, and in fact makes Web browsing possible.

Clever people have put “Web interfaces” on most of the rest of the ‘Net. Because of this, most people use only a Web browser and perhaps a separate e-mail client to do all that they do on the Internet.