Web 1.0

Web 1.0 is a retrospective label for the first stage of the World Wide Web, which Tim Berners-Lee proposed at CERN in 1989 and which spread to the public in the 1990s. Websites in this period were mostly static pages built by their owners and read by visitors, with few ways for users to add content beyond email and guestbooks. Personal homepages, online directories, early search engines and company brochure sites were typical. It was also the era of the dot-com boom, when the first e-commerce shops and internet banking services appeared. The name was coined only once people began describing a newer, more interactive Web 2.0, and the three-stage story is now often extended to Web3, whose supporters describe the eras as "read", "read-write" and "read-write-own". The boundaries between the stages are loose rather than precise.