The World Wide Web was created in 1990 by a scientist name Tim Berners-Lee. He created it as a way of scientists around the globe to freely pass information.

The Web gradually gained momentum and compromised of about 50 known web servers by 1993. In that same year a team from the university of Illinois released the first version of the 'Mosaic' browser for PC, Unix and MAC.

In 1994 the Internet entered popular culture and exploded in popularity. A few of the team which developed Mosaic set up Netscape and the rest is history.

The Static Web

The static web is the simplest Web structure. Users request a page from the server via their browser. An already-made HMTL document is then returned to the client browser.

This HTML contains text and possibly hyperlinks. However, there is no dynamic content and no way for a user to interact with the site.

The Dynamic Web

People soon became frustrated with this lack of interaction and looked for more capabilities from their web pages.

Small Java 'applets' or Microsoft Active X controls were soon dispatched with web pages. These allowed some degree of interaction, but fell short of being truly 'dynamic'.

The solution came with the introduction of 'common gateway interface' (CGI) programs. CGI programs reside on the server and can accept client (browser) requests, interpret them, then return an HTML page as a response. ASP and JSP are examples of CGI programs.

The step from dynamic web pages to 'web applications' was a relatively small one. The N-tier Web delivering complex web applications is where the Web is today in its evolution. It's come a very long way in just over a decade.