Seems like last week

March 1989, when Tim Berners-Lee, a computer scientist at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland wrote a paper called Information Management: A Proposal. The proposal suggested a way of managing information that uses a "hypertext" process to link related documents together over a network.

Features he proposed:
Remote access across networks,
Cross-system platform compatibility
No centralization - allowing nodes anywhere
Access to existing data
Bookmarks (called "Private Links")
All basics of the Web today.

In October 1990, Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau created a working prototype of "WorldWideWeb", with Hyperlinks and HTML, file transfers, and web features galore, but in text.

In February 1993, the Web finally went from text-only when Marc Andreesen with NCSA wrote the Mosaic browser.

March of 1994, Marc Andreesen and some colleagues left NCSA to form "Mosaic Communications Corp." (later renamed Netscape Communications).

In some box somewhere I still have my Mosaic disk I used when I ditched Compuserve and the went on the internet using a free dialup connection, probably 1994. It was kind of techie, I had to write a batch file to set modem baud rate, parity, etc, and a linked text file index for outside viewers and players to be able to see most things, since viewers were not built into the browser.

Oh, by the way, Burners-Lee was a Brit, and one story said that like Mickey Mantle, whose parents put baseballs in his crib, Burner-Lee had intellectual computer nerd parents who played games around the breakfast table like "What is the square root of -4?" So inventing HTML must have been a piece of cake. He is now at MIT, directing the W3 consortium, helping set standards and protocols to keep the internet non-propriatary and open.