On August 6, 1991, Tim Berners-Lee posted a message to the alt.hypertext Usenet newsgroup describing the WorldWideWeb project he had built at CERN. The post is widely taken as the moment the Web became public: it explained the project to an audience beyond CERN and invited anyone interested to obtain the software.
In the message Berners-Lee describes a project that “aims to allow links to be made to any information anywhere,” using an address scheme that combines an access method, a hostname, and a path. He mentions the tools available at the time, a hypertext editor for NeXT computers and a line-mode browser that ran on most systems, and he introduces HTTP as a new protocol that lets servers return equivalent hypertext files from various data sources.
Crucially, the post made the work freely available. Berners-Lee notes that the code was “copyright CERN but free distribution and use is not normally a problem,” and points readers to anonymous FTP to retrieve it. Although the project began to help physicists collaborate, he explicitly welcomed spreading the Web to other areas and building gateways to other data.
This single newsgroup post marks the transition of the Web from an internal CERN experiment to an open, shared system that anyone could join and extend, the social act that turned a piece of software into a global medium.