Tim Berners-Lee envisioned what nobody else did: a cross between a static repository of information and a growing “‘web’” of notes with links (like references) between them,” as he wrote in his seminal paper “Information Management: A Proposal.” Working at the European CERN organization, Tim developed the idea for the hypertext transfer protocol, the means by which users could access resources on the web. Tim then took his NeXT computer and gave the vision actual form.

On this day, February 26, in 1991, Tim Berners-Lee demonstrated to a group of colleagues his first basic architecture of the Internet, a platform he named WorldWideWeb. Much later the browser would be renamed Nexus to avoid confusion with the World Wide Web.

Screenshots of the browser are still widely available, and convey a good sense of how influential it was to the web browsing technology in use today. Pages loaded in framed “windows”, with an X on the upper right side to close each one. Scroll bars to pan the windows up and down ran over the left edges. Hyperlinks were underlined. A modern-day user could easily sit down in front of Tim’s computer and do the basic operations without a pause.