Twenty years ago, in March 1989, a young British engineer of Physics CERN - European Organization for Nuclear Research - Tim Berners-Lee, called his supervisor to a document entitled Information Management: a proposal . The idea: use a system of hypertext links to facilitate information exchange among scientists.

Considered vague, but promising, the project, has joined a few months later the system engineer Robert Cailliau, received the green light that would give rise to a revolution of the Internet, and life itself, the World Wide Web. Either the World Wide Web, the large network of sites communicating via the HTTP protocol (HyperText Transfer Protocol).

Leaving for a time its work on its future particle accelerator - the Large Hadron Collider - CERN celebrate this Friday 13 March, and video on a site dedicated the 20th anniversary of the Web.

In 1993, the Web accounted for only 1% of Internet traffic

Tim Berners-Lee was present to answer direct questions from users, to discuss the latest technologies appear on the Web and to demonstrate the origin of the browser "WWW".

For the general public, the Web has truly emerged in early 1993, with the development by the National Center for Supercomputing (NCSA), University of Illinois, the first version of its browser, Mosaic, which was soon available for Mac and PC.

At the time, the web world was gray, dotted almost exclusively blue hyperlinks, which when clicked, turn to purple. It is reported as 500 servers, and the "WWW" accounted for only 1% of Internet traffic.

At the end of 1994, the number of servers was increased to 10000, and the Web were already 10 million users. Today, it's almost on another media that we surf. Although the protocol remained the same. But the site, which welcomes new technologies such as Flash, Ajax, spreads now on mobile.

As users, they are now several hundred million in all countries of the world, visit in early 2009 a 216 million websites on the Network.