<P> In 1992 the Computing and Networking Department of CERN, headed by David Williams, did not support Berners - Lee's work . A two - page email sent by Williams stated that the work of Berners - Lee, with the goal of creating a facility to exchange information such as results and comments from CERN experiments to the scientific community, was not the core activity of CERN and was a misallocation of CERN's IT resources . Following this decision, Tim Berners - Lee left CERN despite many of his peers in the IT center advocating for his support, in particular, M. Ben Segal from the distributed computing SHIFT project . He left for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he continued to develop the HTTP protocol . </P> <P> An early CERN - related contribution to the Web was the parody band Les Horribles Cernettes, whose promotional image is believed to be among the Web's first five pictures . </P> <P> In keeping with its birth at CERN and the first page opened, early adopters of the World Wide Web were primarily university - based scientific departments or physics laboratories such as Fermilab and SLAC . By January 1993 there were fifty Web servers across the world . In April 1993 CERN made the World Wide Web available on a royalty - free basis . By October 1993 there were over five hundred servers online . Two of the earliest webcomics started on the World Wide Web in 1993: Doctor Fun and NetBoy . </P> <P> Early websites intermingled links for both the HTTP web protocol and the then - popular Gopher protocol, which provided access to content through hypertext menus presented as a file system rather than through HTML files . Early Web users would navigate either by bookmarking popular directory pages, such as Berners - Lee's first site at http://info.cern.ch/, or by consulting updated lists such as the NCSA "What's New" page . Some sites were also indexed by WAIS, enabling users to submit full - text searches similar to the capability later provided by search engines . </P>

When did the world wide web become popular