The World Wide Web was not created by a software company or a university computer-science department. It was invented at CERN, the European particle-physics laboratory near Geneva, by a software engineer named Tim Berners-Lee. CERN’s own account states plainly that Berners-Lee created the Web while working there in 1989.
It began as a way to solve a CERN problem. Thousands of scientists from around the world used the laboratory, and information about projects and experiments was scattered across many computers. Berners-Lee proposed a linked system so that anyone could reach any document from any machine. His March 1989 proposal, “Information Management: A Proposal,” is the starting point.
By 1990 he had built the first web browser and the first web server, both running on a NeXT computer at CERN, and had written the first versions of the standards that still power the Web: URLs, HTTP, and HTML. His page at the World Wide Web Consortium confirms that he “wrote the first web client and server in 1990.”
So the technology behind every website traces back to a physics lab, where it was created to help researchers share their work, and then given away to the world.