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Today social media are all the rage. LinkedIn is a public company and Facebook wants to be and Google is so big it scares people sometimes. But before those companies were even a gleam in some uber-geek's eye, there needed to be the web. Here's how it came to be.

The internet itself grew out of several government projects but by 1989 there were only around 600,000 folks on it. Commercial activity was not allowed, so most of them were government researchers, scientists, and assorted geeks.  They exchanged research data and personal emails.  The personal emails were likely to contain obscure mathematical jokes and references to science fiction characters. 

Essentially, we got from the geek-based internet to your grandmother and millions of other folks by taking several steps. At every step we can see how people, problems, preparation and resources interact.

Let's start with a single person.  His name is Tim Berners-Lee.  He's the son of computer scientists, the sort of kid who built toy computers out of cardboard boxes.  In 1984 he was working at CERN, a physics research lab in Geneva Switzerland.

There were lots of researchers at CERN who worked with each other on different projects. They needed to keep up with what each other was doing. Tim Berners-Lee decided to see if he could help.

His first crack at solving the problem was something he called "Enquire Within Upon Everything," a name he lifted from a Victorian encyclopedia.  Enquire was a program that used something called hypertext links to tie bits of text together. 

Hypertext had been around for a while, since the sixties, in fact.  So the basic tool wasn't new.  What was new was the application to the problem of helping folks keep up with each others' work.  For a while, the solution was good enough. The net was becoming more important as a way to share information.

So it was back to the drawing boards, or, more accurately, to the project proposal process.  It took a couple of years to get the right design and approval.  Berners-Lee and others developed a system they called the World Wide Web to link and display information over the net.  Among the other names they considered were "Mine of Information" and "Information Mesh."

It's very important to understand that this web thing didn't spring from the head of one person, or even get created without dependence on other things.  For one thing, the basic concept looked a lot like something drawn up by Ted Nelson (who coined the term "hypertext") in 1981.  In a publication called Literary Machines, Nelson outlined Xanadu: "a networked, world-wide system for publication."

The language of web pages, HTML (HyperText Markup Language), was developed based on SGML, which originally invented by Charles Goldfarb for printers in 1979. It wouldn't have worked without some agreement on how the internet would work. 

And Berners-Lee wasn't the only one at CERN to come up with the idea, either.  There was an independent proposal for using hypertext to handle documents at CERN by Robert Cailliau.  The end product was the result of the work of many people.  But that "many people" thing was just beginning.

Berners-Lee shared what he was doing in an internet newsgroup, alt.hypertext.  That more or less made the continued development of the web a world project.  It's a good thing too, because it's doubtful that CERN alone could have found the human or financial resources to do what came next.

People all over the world got involved. They developed text-based browsers with names like Viola and Midas and Lynx. One of those folks was a precocious kid at the University of Illinois named Marc Andreesen.

Andreesen and friends developed a browser called Mosaic in 1993.  The important and new thing about Mosaic was that it would display pictures and text together.  Mosaic looked and acted like just about every browser you see today.

Things would have to get more user-friendly though, because Mosaic was still a product for geeks.  The folks who used it were willing to spend hours downloading a program over slow connections, then spend days installing it and tweaking it so that they could go back to the net and find more documents about computer programs.  In that form, Mosaic, and the web simply wouldn't work for you and me and grandma.

Then, in October, 1994, a company called Spry released a product called Internet-in-a-Box. There was no unique technology about this product, but it's the one that took the internet public.

Internet-in-a-Box used the Mosaic browser. But it added a few things. They added manuals and a help line phone number.  They told people how to connect to the net.  They made it as easy as possible. Those added up to usability.

After that it was helter-skelter, pell-mell and Katie-bar-the-door.  Hundreds of companies came and went.  Microsoft got into the act and into court.  And more of us, millions of us, came to the net—you and me and grandma.

Looking back, it seems so logical and inevitable. At the time, though, it wasn't so obvious.  Back in late 1993, I was among several people interviewed for a special Technology section of the Wall Street Journal. The idea was to figure out what the "killer application" for the web might be.  When I look back at that section, I'm struck with how so many of us missed the web as that application. 

And without the web there would be no e-commerce. You couldn't read the NY Times unless you could lay your hands on a copy of the paper. There would be no social media. The world would be very, very different.

So, be thankful for folks like Tim Berners-Lee and Marc Andreesen and others who did the technical work that made this all happen.  Be thankful for the problems that they had to solve that generated solutions that make our lives better.

Be thankful for organizations like CERN who provided resources.  Be thankful for the folks willing to take risks and commit resources and energy and money.

Be thankful for all the folks behind the scenes developing standards and writing rules and writing ads and taking risks to make the magic possible. Be especially thankful for all those who did it for free, as a labor of love, as something important that needed doing.

There are many stories of human triumph that tell us of the strong leader with the strong vision. We don't tell many stories like this one.  It's tempting to see this as the story of Tim Berners-Lee "inventing the web."  But that's not the heart of the story.

The heart of the story involves lots of folks with problems to solve or opportunities to seize, willing to work and take risks and build on the work of others and to contribute to something that is bigger than they are.  In the end, I find that much more compelling and inspiring.

Wally's Working Supervisor's Support Kit is a collection of information and tools to help working supervisors do a better job. It's based on what Wally's learned in over twenty years of supervisory skills training. Click here to check it out.