Prerequisites

Blueprints · 114 words · 1 min read

HTTP: The Protocol That Delivered the Web

Tim Berners-Lee's simple request-response protocol turned the internet into a global hypertext system.

#A Proposal at CERN

In 1989, Tim Berners-Lee submitted a proposal titled “Information Management: A Proposal” to his boss at CERN. The response, famously, was “Vague, but exciting.” By 1991, the first HTTP server was running at info.cern.ch.

HTTP was deliberately simple: a client sends a text request, a server sends a text response. No sessions, no state, no complexity. This statelessness — frustrating as it would later become — was the key to HTTP’s scalability.

#The Anatomy of a Request

GET /index.html HTTP/1.0
Host: info.cern.ch
Accept: text/html

Three lines. That’s all it took to fetch the first web page. The simplicity of this protocol is what allowed the web to spread so quickly — anyone could implement an HTTP server.