World Wide Web

Hello. My name is the World Wide Web, but you can call me the Web for short. You can think of me as a giant, magical spiderweb that connects computers all over the planet. My strings are invisible, but they carry amazing things like pictures, stories, and songs from one computer to another in the blink of an eye. Before I was born, it was very difficult for people to share things from their computers. Imagine you drew a beautiful picture on your computer and wanted to show it to your cousin who lives far away. You couldn't just send it. Scientists had this problem too. They had lots of important ideas on their computers, but they were all stuck in separate places. They needed a way to connect everything, and that's where my story begins.

I was invented by a very kind and smart scientist named Tim Berners-Lee. He was working in a big laboratory called CERN in a country named Switzerland. In 1989, he looked at all the computers and thought, “There must be a better way to share all this information.” He had a wonderful idea. He imagined creating secret doorways between pages of information on computers. You could just click on a special word, and poof. You would jump to a new page, even if it was on a computer all the way across the world. He called these magical doorways 'hyperlinks.' He worked very hard, and I started to take my first breaths. Then, on a very exciting day, August 6th, 1991, the very first website went live for everyone to see. It was a simple page, but it was all about me. It explained what I was and how I worked. I was finally here, ready to connect the world.

My inventor, Tim, was a generous person. He didn't want to keep me a secret or sell me for lots of money. He believed that I should belong to everyone. So, in 1993, he and the scientists at CERN decided to give my recipe away to the whole world for free. After that, I started to grow bigger and bigger, and faster than anyone could have imagined. At first, only scientists used me. But soon, people everywhere started building their own parts of my web. They made websites for playing games, watching funny videos, and reading stories. They built places to talk to friends and family, no matter how far apart they lived. I grew from one little website into a giant universe of fun and learning. Today, you are a part of my story every time you go online to learn something new or share a smile with someone. I help connect millions of people and their wonderful ideas, and I'm still growing every single day.