The Web just turned 25 years old. The first website was created at CERN headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland by British computer scientist Sir Tim Berners-Lee on Aug. 6, 1991. The original site Berners-Lee created is still available at http://info.cern.ch/. Berners-Lee is not only credited with creating the first website, but also the first web browser and web server.
The Berners-Lee web server ran on a NeXT Computer. NeXT was the company that Steve Jobs started upon leaving Apple in 1985. Steve Jobs returned to Apple in 1996 when Apple purchased NeXT for more than 400 million dollars.
The major innovations of the web were not immediately obvious. The ability to link to other web sites was useful, but the browsers at the time were text only. The creation of Mosaic in 1993 at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) led to the popularization of the web.
Mosaic was one of the first web browsers to allow the addition of images to pages. This made web browsing much more compelling. The popularity of the Mosaic web browser led many of the original creators of Mosaic to form a new company to create a web browser called Netscape.
The exponential growth of the web enabled the creation of companies to develop site and services for this growing market, leading to the Internet boom in the late 1990s, which ended in 2000. Those companies have since become household names: Google, Amazon, and EBay.
Before the web there was Bulletin Board Services, Gopher, and other services that allowed people to interact remotely. The web has since moved beyond those small groups that used these services to being a utility that is used by all.