Before 1989, computers were rarely networked and no world wide web of computers existed to share information via websites.  The internet has existed since the 1970s, hosting messaging boards and other such protocols, now largely reneged to the dark net, beneath the notice of modern search engines.

The bright and colourful world of web pages, blogs, social media feeds and shared content that most people think of as the internet, the world wide web, was the information sharing brain child of Tim Burners-Lee.  In a short 18 months, he wrote the three protocols required to create and share information over the web and it soon was sharing information with the public.  Admittedly, pages were initially black text on a grey background with the possibility of a horizontal rule but this was revolutionary, and colour, images, different layouts, and finally video all followed as computing power and network capacity grew exponentially over time as the web evolved into the social networking phenomenon we know today.

Read more about the history, present and the future of the web on the Web Foundation website.