The first-ever website (info[.]cern[.]ch) was published on August 6, 1991 by British physicist Tim Berners-Lee while at CERN, in Switzerland. On April 30, 1993 CERN made World Wide Web (“W3” for short) technology available on a royalty-free basis to the public domain, allowing the Web to flourish.
The World Wide Web was invented in March of 1989 by Tim Berners-Lee . He also introduced the first web server, the first browser and editor (the “WorldWideWeb.app”), the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) and, in October 1990, the first version of the “HyperText Markup Language” (HTML).
In 2013 alone, the web has grown by more than one third: from about 630 million websites at the start of the year to over 850 million by December 2013 (of which 180 million were active).
Over 50% of websites today are hosted on either Apache or nginx, both open source web servers. As of June 2014, Microsoft has got very close to Apache in terms of market share (only a 0.15% difference separates the two). If the trend continues, Microsoft could soon become the leading web server developer for the first time in history.