<P> In 1980, Tim Berners - Lee, an English independent contractor at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Switzerland, built ENQUIRE, as a personal database of people and software models, but also as a way to play with hypertext; each new page of information in ENQUIRE had to be linked to an existing page . </P> <P> Berners - Lee's contract in 1980 was from June to December, but in 1984 he returned to CERN in a permanent role, and considered its problems of information management: physicists from around the world needed to share data, yet they lacked common machines and any shared presentation software . </P> <P> Shortly after Berners - Lee's return to CERN, TCP / IP protocols were installed on some key non-Unix machines at the institution, turning it into the largest Internet site in Europe within a few years . As a result, CERN's infrastructure was ready for Berners - Lee to create the Web . </P> <P> Berners - Lee wrote a proposal in March 1989 for "a large hypertext database with typed links". Although the proposal attracted little interest, Berners - Lee was encouraged by his boss, Mike Sendall, to begin implementing his system on a newly acquired NeXT workstation . He considered several names, including Information Mesh, The Information Mine or Mine of Information, but settled on World Wide Web . </P>

Where did the world wide web come from