Utopian Beginnings

The Web was initially proposed by Tim Berners-Lee in 1989, as a web for researchers at CERN to share ideas:

We should work toward a universal linked information system, in which generality and portability are more important than fancy graphics techniques and complex extra facilities.

The aim would be to allow a place to be found for any information or reference which one felt was important, and a way of finding it afterwards. The result should be sufficiently attractive to use that it the information contained would grow past a critical threshold, so that the usefulness the scheme would in turn encourage its increased use.

https://www.w3.org/History/1989/proposal.html