The Web was dreamt up, and given life, by Tim Berners-Lee whilst working at CERN, the European physics research centre in Geneva. Within a matter of a few short years the Web had exploded into the public consciousness, most of whom had never heard of the Internet before - so for many people the Web and the Net seemed to be interchangeable words for the same thing.

One of the factors that made this Web explosion possible was the development of user friendly Web browsers, with the US National Centre for Supercomputing Applications’ (NCSA) Mosaic being one of the most influential. Mosaic was created by NCSA student Marc Andreessen and staff member Eric Bina. Famously, Andreessen went on to develop Mosaic as a commercial product, although under the terms of an out-of-court settlement with NCSA he had to change the name of the browser and his company, which became Netscape.