Main article: History of the World Wide Web
The World Wide Web (WWW) was created in 1990 by CERN physicist Tim Berners-Lee.[3] On 30 April 1993, CERN announced that the World Wide Web would be free to use for anyone.[4] Before the introduction of HTML and HTTP, other protocols such as File Transfer Protocol and the gopher protocol were used to retrieve individual files from a server. These protocols offer a simple directory structure which the user navigates and chooses files to download. Documents were most often presented as plain text files without formatting, or were encoded in word processor formats.