The next key technological system that makes up the WEB is multimedia. The history of multimedia stretches back to 1963, when Douglas Engelbart published his ground-breaking paper A Conceptual Framework for the Augmentation of Man's Intellect. Multimedia give the WEB its sensory richness, and it was the development of Mosaic, the first multimedia browser, that has lead to the WEB's rapidly growing popularity.

 The final key technological system, the one that is most fundamental to the WEB, is hypertext. Hypertext gives the WEB its navigational power, and flexible nonlinear structure. It is only with hypertext that the dream of Vannevar Bush, and Ted Nelson is starting to be realized. The work of these two pioneers; not only laid the foundation for hypertext, but envisioned the WEB itself.

 The foundation was laid, then on Spring day in 1989 at CERN, a proposal was made and accepted. What was simply referred to as the Project was born...