The World Wide Web was created in 1990 by CERN engineer Tim Berners-Lee.^[1] On 30 April 1993, CERN announced that the World Wide Web would be free to use for anyone.^[2]

Before the introduction of HTML and HTTP, other protocols such as file transfer protocol and the gopher protocol were used to retrieve individual files from a server. These protocols offer a simple directory structure which the user navigates and chooses files to download. Documents were most often presented as plain text files without formatting or were encoded in word processor formats.