The web and the internet are not the same thing.
The internet is the global network of connected computers. The World Wide Web is something that runs on top of it: pages linked together, invented by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN in 1989. CERN then gave the technology away royalty-free, a decision that helped the web beat its rivals.
People use the words interchangeably, but they mean different things. The internet is the physical and logical network: cables, routers and the protocols that move data between machines. The web is one service that runs over it, a vast collection of documents and other resources connected by hyperlinks and addressed by URLs, fetched using the HTTP protocol. Email and file transfer also use the internet without being part of the web.
Tim Berners-Lee, an English computer scientist, was trying to solve a practical problem at CERN: how to store, update and find documents in a large, constantly changing organisation and share them with collaborators elsewhere. Rather than organise files in a rigid tree, he built on his earlier ENQUIRE system and on Ted Nelson's idea of hypertext, and insisted the system be decentralised, with no central control over who links to what. His March 1989 proposal did not even have a name.
By the end of 1990 he had a working browser, called WorldWideWeb, and a server running at CERN, along with the first versions of HTTP, URLs and HTML. It was opened to the whole internet in August 1991. Even the familiar 'www' was partly an accident: according to a CERN colleague, the project page was meant to live at www.cern.ch and CERN's home page at info.cern.ch, but the addresses were never switched.
The decisive moment came in April 1993, when CERN made the web's protocol and code available royalty-free. That same year the University of Minnesota said it would charge fees for its rival system, Gopher, and Gopher stalled. Later in 1993 the Mosaic browser added inline images, and within a year thousands of websites had appeared.
Source: Wikipedia — World Wide Web · Text summarised from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)
