In 1990, Sir Tim Berners-Lee , an technology specialist at CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research), decided to build a system that used existing network connections to link research documents to each other across networks.

The concept of linking documents was not new. In 1945, before technology existed to implement such a system, Vannevar Bush described a system that he called Memex, and over the years, people invented several other hypertext implementations.

However, Berners-Lee was the first to implement such a system on a larger network that several users could access easily, using the existing Internet structure that allowed data to be shared easily across networks. Berners-Lee named the new system the WorldWideWeb, based on the image of computers connected to each other through a web-like mesh of networks.