1991 – The World Wide Web is opened to the public. The World Wide Web (also known as WWW, W3, or simply the Web) is a global interconnected information system that enables content sharing over the Internet. It facilitates access to documents and other web resources according to specific rules of the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP). The Web was invented by English computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee while at CERN in 1989 and opened to the public in 1993. It was conceived as a "universal linked information system." Documents and other media content are made available to the network through web servers and can be accessed by programs such as web browsers. Servers and resources on the World Wide Web are identified and located through a character string called a uniform resource locator (URL). Berners-Lee submitted a proposal to CERN in March 1989, without giving the system a name.[6] He got a working system implemented by the end of 1990, including a browser called WorldWideWeb (which became the name of the project and of the network) and an HTTP server running at CERN. As part of that development, he defined the first version of the HTTP protocol, the basic URL syntax, and implicitly made HTML the primary document format.[17] The technology was released outside CERN to other research institutions starting in January 1991, and then to the whole Internet on 23 August 1991. The Web was a success at CERN and began to spread to other scientific and academic institutions. Within the next two years, there were 50 websites created. CERN made the Web protocol and code available royalty-free on 30 April 1993, enabling its widespread use. The World Wide Web has become the world's dominant information systems platform. It is the primary tool that billions of people worldwide use to interact with the Internet.