"The first machine that functioned similarly to the World Wide Web was conceived in 1945 when Vannevar Bush published an article titled 'As We May Think.' This article appeared in the July issue of 'The Atlantic Monthly.' After reading this article, a young man named Doug Engelbart was inspired by the potential of computers. A few years later, he created the mouse and Windows concepts that we use in our computers today.

In his article, Bush introduced the idea of MEMEX, a project aimed at creating a machine where we could store and manage our data and information, and share it with others through links. At that time, microfilms were widely used for storing information. Bush explored how hypertextual links could be used to access and manipulate data within microfilms.

The term 'Hypertext' is attributed to Theodor Holm Nelson, who worked extensively on 'Non-Sequential Writing' and published an essay called 'Literary Machines' in 1962.

In this essay, he described a future project called 'Xanadu', which would play a crucial role in publishing, classifying, and connecting related information. This information would be accessible as 'Hypertext' anywhere in the world, not just in one location. Today's internet, while not fully aligned with Nelson's vision, has far exceeded what people in the 1970s could have imagined. At that time, the concept of global information was not prevalent, and only a few dozen electronic calculators were beginning to be used.

In 1967, Nelson's ideas were considered and work began on them when Andy (Andy Van Dam)'s group created the first 'Hypertext Retrieval Applications' called 'Hypertext Editing System' at Brown University. Van Dam, a friend and colleague of Nelson, used an IBM/360 mainframe computer with only 126 KB of RAM. This project was financially supported by IBM and later sold to the Houston Manned Spacecraft Center, where it was used for documenting various Apollo programs.

Tim Berners-Lee, a young researcher, was also greatly influenced by the work of Vannevar Bush and Ted Nelson. He worked extensively on ideas related to hypertext.

In 1980, Berners-Lee joined CERN Laboratories in Geneva as an independent programmer. He quickly realized that in an environment where new ideas were presented daily and people were constantly striving to innovate, organizing information was a significant challenge. This was a place where numerous researchers were engaged in various studies, and much of the critical information was retained only in the minds of these brilliant individuals."

Tim Berners-Lee's Work

Tim Berners-Lee, in his spare time, created a program called "Enquire." This program established a connection between different people. It was a research project or, you could say, a tool. Even if a person or project wasn't directly connected to this tool, Berners-Lee could create a new link for every researcher, enabling all researchers to collaborate on one project or even multiple projects simultaneously.

After organizing data using hypertext technology, the day came when Tim Berners-Lee left CERN Laboratories due to the expiration of his contract. However, the eight-inch floppy disk containing the Enquire program remained there.

In 1984, Tim got the opportunity to return to CERN Laboratories. During this time, he wrote programs for printers and then began writing a program for a new documentation system.

Towards the end of the 1980s, Tim repeatedly tried to present his research on information storage to his CERN supervisors, but his requests were consistently dismissed. Tim repeatedly tried to explain to the computer industry that a system was needed to share information over the internet globally, but companies didn't listen. At that time, many programs existed for creating information on the internet, but none could share this information globally.

Berners-Lee contacted many companies that created such programs, but his journey ended with Electronic Book Technology, Andy Van Dam's company. They had extensive knowledge of hypertextual technologies, but Van Dam didn't pay much attention to his work. Later, Berners-Lee said, "I think the difficult time is over because I've tried to explain to many people that they should connect internet connectivity to their programs. They listened carefully, but none were willing to work with me."

Tim Berners-Lee's words fell on deaf ears, and the World Wide Web gradually began to lose its identity. However, a fortunate coincidence changed history. At CERN Laboratories, Tim met someone who changed his life and the future of computer science. This happened when Tim befriended Robert Cailliau, an engineer who was greatly influenced by Berners-Lee's ideas and agreed that something should exist for researchers to share their ideas with other researchers.

From then on, they both focused on creating a work environment at CERN Laboratories where everyone could share their general information with other employees. The biggest challenge was that all computers at CERN were not the same, making it impossible to transfer information from one computer to another. In 1990, Berners-Lee started writing a new program called "WorldWideWeb," which he completed by mid-November. He created rules for exchanging data between different computers to share hypertext information, which he named "Hypertext Transfer Protocol," which we now call HTTP.

In addition, another significant decision was made that enabled the development of the World Wide Web. This was the development of the HTML language, which stands for "Hyper Text Markup Language." An indexing system was created within it that allowed any computer document to be identified, and a document address was assigned, known as a URL (Uniform Resource Locator).

Thus, the global task of sharing documents began. In this process, any document could be sent from one computer to another, even if those two or more computers were located in any corner of the world. In his book "Weaving the Web," Tim Berners-Lee writes:

"What people had the most trouble understanding was the structure of this system, which was nothing more than URL, HTTP, and HTML. There wasn't any one computer overseeing it all, no single network over which computer documents were being shared, or a single space where all the information resided."

Tim Berners-Lee is certain that the machine he created is not limited to just retrieving information, but is a living system where corporations can store their information in a way that every user can utilize and contribute to expanding it. Therefore, from the first version of this program, Berners-Lee also created a program that could expand Hypertexts, and another useful program to publish HTML documents online. After establishing data transfer rules, a system was needed to establish communication between different computers. The possibility of electronic communication through HTTP-HTML using telephone lines was created. On November 12, 1990, Berners-Lee and Cailliau presented their document to CERN, titled "WorldWideWeb: Proposal for a Hypertext Project," explaining why a system for sharing information was needed.

"Today, all our information storage systems are so incompatible that retrieving information from them is a very difficult task, and when retrieving information is difficult, sharing that information from one computer to another is even harder. This causes a lot of problems for people, especially when they need specific information at a particular time that is not on their computer. All our computer systems are filled with information, and there is a need to connect them all to work together. This should be done in such a way that clicking on a link brings up all the information of that link, regardless of which computer it is stored on. This is our idea, which works behind Hyper Text."

On Christmas Day 1990, while Tim Berners-Lee was working on his system, he gave the world a great gift: the world's first website. He uploaded it to a server and named the website info.cern.ch. This website contained the phone numbers, names, and addresses of employees working at CERN Laboratories. However, the question arises as to what benefit there is in putting the names and addresses of all the researchers of a single laboratory on one website. The website should be able to add information about new employees.

Tim Berners-Lee accepted these challenges and created a web browser that could use FTP to transfer files from one server to another. He also created a Usenet newsgroup server for exchanging messages.

Tim Berners-Lee's new system was quickly adopted by people, and they gradually stopped using the systems they had previously used to retrieve information. These systems were Wais, Prospero, and Gopher, created by Brewster Kahle, Clifford Newman, and Mark McCahill at the University of Minnesota.

Another reason for Gopher's decline was that the University of Minnesota decided that companies would have to pay a fee to use Gopher. This decision was made in 1993, two years after Gopher's creation. Users began using the web because they felt the University of Minnesota might try to charge them in some way.

The success of the web spread like wildfire, and info.cern.ch saw 10 to 100 new connections being created daily for people to exchange information. This data is from July to August 1991. Shortly after, the number of new connections increased to 10,000 during the summer. This was all due to HTML, which allowed users, whether professionals or students, to both retrieve and provide information using HTML.

In December 1991, Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau had to go to San Antonio, Texas, to attend a conference called "Hypertext 91." They were somewhat outsiders at the conference, which was filled with researchers who were there to explain Hypertext. Cailliau and Berners-Lee presented their paper, but it was rejected because some members of the committee felt that the Hypertext principles violated certain rules. The following year, the conference was held again, and projects were brought back and presented to other researchers. This time, the conference was named "World Wide Web."

During the conference, Berners-Lee and Cailliau wanted to demonstrate that they had created a fully functional system. To do this, they gave a public demonstration where they connected their computer to the CERN Laboratories web server using a telephone line. At that time, most attendees were unaware of the internet, and Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau had to create a connection using the hotel's telephone line to connect their computer to the CERN Laboratories. Robert called San Antonio, Texas, to ask permission to use the university's modem and internet line. The next problem was the power socket, as the modem didn't seem compatible with American sockets. To solve this, Robert found a welder at the hotel and had the wires directly connected. In this way, they opened the eyes of the scientific community present and showed them how hypertext works without connecting to a third server.

The first web browsers created in 1991 quickly became popular, and many researchers began working on them, giving them various names like Erwise, ViolaWWW, Midas, Samba, Arena, Lynx, and Cello. However, the most unique and powerful program was Mosaic, launched by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) in early 1993. It was created by a student named Marc Andreessen with the help of Eric Bina.

Mosaic could do everything that previous web browsers couldn't. For instance, it could display an image along with hypertext. Before Mosaic, displaying images with hypertext required creating a separate link, and clicking on that link would open another window showing the image. This feature made Mosaic very popular. The first version of Mosaic was launched in January and initially only ran on UNIX computers. In August of the same year, versions for Windows and Macintosh computers were also released, and Mosaic ran on them as well. In December, the New York Times published a very long article about Mosaic and the World Wide Web (WWW), and after that, a phrase entered everyone's minds, which was called "Internet Revolution." A year later, Marc Andreessen, the former president of Silicon Graphics, founded a company which he named Mosaic Communications, but later renamed it Netscape Communications because the University of Illinois held the copyright to the name Mosaic.

On December 9, 1991, President Clinton signed the High-Performance Computing Act (HPCA), which promoted the concept of the National Data Superhighway. This was a project that aimed to connect all research centers with high-speed computer connections.

Clinton also made this a part of his election campaign. During Clinton's tenure, the data superhighway was presented as a major solution for protecting the American economy.

In 1991, the US Congress passed the National Research and Education Network (NREN) project, specifically designed for national research and education networks. The project cost approximately one billion dollars, in which they built data transmission as a backbone. Similar experiments were carried out in most European countries. Initially, the internet's infrastructure was funded by public money and later handed over to other companies to turn it into a profitable business.

In 1993, 13 major American companies pressured NREN to think beyond universities, laboratories, and other research centers and to open up these communication services to other companies, businesses, and private households. Their aim was to create a national information infrastructure, a network that everyone in the country could use.

In April 1993, the High-Performance Computing and High-Speed Networking Applications Act was introduced. This was a revised version of the earlier HPCA act, which was introduced in 1991. The purpose of this amendment was to use the internet and data superhighways to connect all schools, libraries, and government offices, and then a slogan emerged: "One Computer One Student."

In addition to the creation of Mosaic, two other events in 1993 contributed to the development of the World Wide Web (WWW). On April 30, 1993, in response to a question from Robert Cailliau and Tim Berners-Lee, CERN announced that the technology created at the Swiss Research Center would be made available to the world free of charge.

In October 1994, Tim Berners-Lee left CERN to work on the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium). His work involved collaborating with the MIT Computer Science Laboratory, the French National Institute for Computer and Automation Research, Japanese Keio University, and CERN. The European Commission continued its external support, and ARPA was renamed DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency). The consortium's primary task was to create software that people could use for free and to provide support to program developers so they could write programs for the web.

In 1995, 80% of people started using Netscape, and this web browser became very popular among internet users. In August, Microsoft launched Windows 95, which included a built-in web browser, eliminating the need for users to install a separate web browser. $150 million was invested in marketing Windows 95 alone. Netscape, which was listed on the stock exchange with 38 million shares, was valued at only $44 million. Andreessen and Clark, who had reached great heights on Wall Street, had to surrender to Microsoft.

Internet Explorer was not a new browser; its origins traced back to the time when people were using Mosaic. In August 1994, a company called Spyglass purchased the commercial license for Mosaic from the National Center for Supercomputing Applications and began the process of integrating it with Windows 95. Mosaic's source code served as the foundation for Internet Explorer, which later became a crucial part of the operating system and drew legal scrutiny towards Microsoft.

Microsoft made the web browser an integral part of the operating system, which constituted unfair competition and marginalized Netscape and other web development companies. Microsoft continues to face legal challenges regarding this. As soon as Windows 95 was released, Internet Explorer became the most widely used browser, and Netscape gradually declined and eventually disappeared. On March 31, 1998, Andreessen and Clark's company won this software war when Netscape Communicator 4.0 was released.

Following this, a new software project emerged called Mozilla. This appeared as Netscape was losing ground. The name Mozilla has an interesting origin, combining "Mosaic" and "Godzilla," a popular Japanese movie monster. After the licensing process was completed, the Mozilla browser was created, and programmers worldwide contributed numerous web programs that continue to update Mozilla. Today, Mozilla is known as Mozilla Firefox. Mozilla Firefox is technically more advanced than Internet Explorer and continues to improve. In November 1998, America Online (AOL) acquired Netscape Communications.

The 1990s were coming to an end, and new communication technologies were rapidly emerging, changing people's lives. Millions of computers worldwide were connected through a network, steering the world in a new direction where information would play a crucial role.