In March 1989, Tim Berners-Lee, then a software engineer at CERN, wrote a document titled “Information Management: A Proposal.” It described a problem familiar to any large organization: information was scattered across many computers and many people, and knowledge was constantly lost as staff came and went. His answer was a distributed hypertext system in which documents on any computer could link to documents on any other.
The proposal argued for openness over polish, stating that “we should work toward a universal linked information system, in which generality and portability are more important than fancy graphics techniques.” It also set out a design principle that still shapes the Web: “the only way in which sufficient flexibility can be incorporated is to separate the information storage software from the information display software, with a well defined interface between them.” That separation is exactly the split between web servers and web browsers.
At this stage Berners-Lee had not yet chosen the name “World Wide Web.” His early sketches referred to the system as “Mesh.” He settled on the name when he wrote the actual software in 1990.
The proposal is the founding document of the Web. It did not immediately win approval or funding, but it gave Berners-Lee enough room to build a prototype, and from that prototype grew the most widely used information system in human history.