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Who invented the World Wide Web, and where?
He proposed a system for sharing documents among physicists.
Berners-Lee wrote his first proposal in March 1989 while working at CERN, the European particle physics laboratory near Geneva. The problem he addressed was practical: physicists came from many institutions, used different computers and kept information in incompatible systems, so documents and project knowledge were hard to find and link. His idea joined hypertext (documents connected by clickable links) with the existing Internet.
A more formal management proposal, co-written with Robert Cailliau, followed in November 1990. By the end of 1990 Berners-Lee had a working server and browser running on a NeXT computer at CERN. He devised three core technologies that remain in use: HTML for writing pages, URLs for addressing them, and HTTP for transferring them.
A common misconception is that the Web and the Internet are the same thing. The Internet is the global network of networks that existed for years beforehand; the Web is one service running on top of it, and email and file transfer are others. On 30 April 1993 CERN released the Web software on a royalty-free basis, which helped it spread quickly. Credit also goes to Cailliau and to early browser developers elsewhere, though the original invention is attributed to Berners-Lee.