It was on 25 May 1994 that First World Wide Web Conference was opened at CERN.

The first International WWW Conference opened at CERN, the European Particle Physics Lab in Geneva, on May 25, 1994. The two-day conference was heavily oversubscribed: Some eight hundred people applied, but only four hundred were admitted. Sometimes referred to as the "Woodstock of the Web," the conference generated new directions for the Internet.

The Web had evolved at CERN under the guidance of British computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee, who had started work in 1989 on a hypertext system that would enable documents to "link" to each other easily. By 1990, he had created the basic structure of the World Wide Web, which was posted on the Internet in the summer of 1991.

Berners-Lee continued to develop the Web through 1993, working with feedback from Internet users. By late 1991 and early 1992, the Web was widely discussed, and in early 1993, Marc Andreessen and other computer graduate students at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois released the Mosaic browser, Netscape's precursor.