In its 15 years of life, the World Wide Web has revolutionised the way we work, rest and play. Although the Internet pre-existed the Web, it was complex and bogged down with technology.

The breakthrough came when Sir Tim Berners-Lee of the Cern physics laboratory in Geneva developed an overlay to the Internet that would hide the technology and make documents much easier to find and access. But the really pivotal date was 6 August 1991, when links to the early computer code were posted on the alt.hypertext discussion group for others to use, develop and pass on.

In the early years, only the scientific and technical community grasped the Web’s potential and alternative systems for accessing information were more popular. The breakthrough came in 1993, when Mosaic, the first PC web browser, was created. At the same time, the creators of Gopher, the main rival, began charging for it, encouraging users to find an alternative. They turned to the World Wide Web.

Berners-Lee’s original vision of the Web was as a medium that people could both read and contribute to and where information could reside indefinitely. His vision has become reality: 15 years later, some early pages can still be viewed and new tools have emerged such as photo-sharing sites, social networks, blogs and user-editable databases (wikis). Today, there are over 100 million websites worldwide.