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English engineer and computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee (also known as TimBL) singlehandedly invented the World Wide Web in 1989 while working at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, and was honoured as such during the 2012 Summer Olympics opening ceremony in London, UK.

His 1989 work built on an earlier 1980 project of his, again whilst working at CERN (as an independent contractor), where he proposed, and implemented, a system based on the concept of hypertext to facilitate sharing and updating information among researchers where that information was scattered among different computers, where users had previously needed to log onto each of those computers separately to obtain such data. Tim has said "I just had to take the hypertext idea and connect it to the Transmission Control Protocol and domain name system ideas and 'Ta-da!' the World Wide Web... Creating the web was really an act of desperation, because the situation without it was very difficult when I was working at CERN then. Most of the technology involved in the web, like the hypertext, like the internet [network], like the multifont text objects, had all been designed already. I just had to put them together. It was a step of generalising, going to a higher level of abstraction, thinking about all the documentation systems out there as being possibly part of a larger imaginary documentation system".

The home of the first-ever website and web server http://info.cern.ch still exists, and you can from there:   1) Browse the first website   2) Browse the first website using the line-mode browser simulator   3) Learn about the birth of the web 4) Learn about CERN, the physics laboratory where the web was born.

Originally the site provided an explanation of what the World Wide Web was, and how people could use a browser and set up a web server, as well as how to get started with ones own website.

The World Wide Web has justifiably been described as "The fastest growing communications medium of all time, [which] has changed the shape of modern life forever. We can [now] all connect with each other instantly, all over the world". As of 2020, the Web sees many, many billions of visitors per day.