It seems such a modern invention but the World Wide Web can trace its foundation back to before the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War.
March 12: Tim Berners-Lee, a British scientist working at CERN in Switzerland, submits a proposal for a "distributed information system" to allow researchers to deal with huge amounts of information generated by complex physics experiments. This is the genesis of the World Wide Web - spelt as three words.
December 20: The world's first website goes live at Info.cern.ch. The first web page is http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html
August 6: The world wide web is launched publicly as Berners-Lee publishes details of the project on the internet.
March: Pipex introduces dial-up internet connection to the UK
April 30: Cern releases the World Wide Web source code and announces it will be available free of charge. It also releases a basic browser along with a library of code. By the end of the year there are more than 500 web servers, and the web accounts for 1% of internet traffic.
May 25 - 27: First International World-Wide Web conference, held at CERN. It is hailed as the "Woodstock of the web".
December: By the end of the year there are 10,000 servers, 2,000 of them commercial. There are 10 million users, with traffic, according to CERN, equivalent to shipping the collected works of Shakespeare every second.
July 16: Jeff Bezos launches Amazon.com as an online bookshop from computers in his garage in Seattle, Washington. It is now the world's largest online retailer.
August 16: Microsoft launches first version of its Internet Explorer web browser, which would come to dominate the market as part of its Windows platform.
September 15: Google.com is registered as a web domain by Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Today Google Inc is the second largest company in the United States, with a market value of around 395 billion dollars £236 billion), only surpassed by Apple (465 billion dollars £278 billion).
January: The DotCom Boom reaches its peak. The previous few years had seen a rush to invest in online firms, from retail to internet service providers (ISPs). Share prices soared. It culminated in ISP AOL buying traditional media company Time Warner for almost $200 billion.
March: DotCom Crash - the bubble bursts because few of the firms that were invested in made any money. Investors lose millions. By October 2002, exacerbated by the effect of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the technology-focused Nasdaq stock index had fallen by 78%.
March: Virgin introduces high-speed broadband internet connections to the UK. By 2007 more than half of UK homes had it, according to Ofcom figures.
February: Harvard psychology student Mark Zuckerberg launches Facebook
with his college roommates to connect students at the university. It was rolled out to the general public in 2006 and as of January 2014 it has about 1.2 billion monthly users. It floated on the Nasdaq stock exchange in October.
November: A new video-hosting website called YouTube is launched. Taking advantage of increasing internet connection speeds it allows users to upload their own under-generated content. Today, according to the company, a billion people watch more than six billion hours of video in 61 languages every month, and 100 hours of footage is uploaded every minute.
March: Twitter Inc is created by Jack Dorsey, Evan Williams, Biz Stone and Noah Glass as "a text message service that allowed users to quickly communicate with a small group". The first tweet is sent by @Jack on March 21.
Today it is a social media giant with almost 650 million active users around the world.
January 9: Apple launch the iPhone. It revolutionises mobile web-surfing with a handset that features a large touchscreen and a mobile-friendly version of its Safari web browser, and spawns the world of apps.
Story continues after slideshow...
World Wide Web 25th Anniversary
World Wide Web 25th anniversary(01 of15)
Open Image ModalFile photo dated 21/09/1999 of Tesco Chief Executive Terry Leahy demonstrating the chains new 'Tesco Direct' Internet shopping facility as it is 25 years since the launch of the World Wide Web. (credit:PA)
World Wide Web 25th anniversary(02 of15)
Open Image ModalFile photo dated 01/07/10 of Stephen Fry, best known in Britain as one half of the comedy duo Fry and Lawrie and his appearances on Blackadder in the 90s. But the technology enthusiast was one of the earlier adopters of the social networking site Twitter and has a global following of more than 6.5 million users as it is 25 years since the launch of the World Wide Web. (credit:PA)
World Wide Web 25th anniversary(03 of15)
Open Image ModalFile photo dated 09/06/13 of Psy, the creator of the Gangnam Style dance craze had the first video to reach a billion views on YouTube in 2012, as it is 25 years since the launch of the World Wide Web. (credit:PA)
World Wide Web 25th anniversary(04 of15)
Open Image ModalFile photo dated 18/06/13 of Julian Assange who first established the whistle-blowing website WikiLeaks in 2006, but only came to international prominence when the site published thousands of United States military and diplomatic cables in partnership with a number of media organisations in 2010. The leaks, which included battlefield video clips and classified reports from Iraq and Afghanistan, came from US Army Intelligence Private Bradley Manning. In April last year, as it is 25 years since the launch of the World Wide Web. (credit:PA)
World Wide Web 25th anniversary(05 of15)
Open Image ModalFile photo dated 09/06/12 of Justin Bieber: The Canadian pop star's talents were first discovered on YouTube, where he amassed a following of millions after his mother began posting videos of him singing cover versions of R&B songs. Bieber's YouTube renditions soon bought him to the attention of Justin Timberlake and Usher, as it is 25 years since the launch of the World Wide Web. (credit:PA)
World Wide Web 25th anniversary(06 of15)
Open Image ModalUndated handout videograb taken from YouTube of Commander Chris Hadfield, the former commander of the International Space Station went viral after he recorded a video of a version of David Bowie's Space Oddity. The retired Canadian astronaut used social media to record his final space mission with the ISS in May 2013, uploading videos and pictures of his daily life to his one million followers. His version of Space Oddity, which was recorded on board the space station, has been seen 22 million times on YouTube, as it is 25 years since the launch of the World Wide Web. (credit:PA)
World Wide Web 25th anniversary(07 of15)
Open Image ModalFile photo dated 06/07/07 of the Arctic Monkeys lead singer Alex Turner performing as the Sheffield-born rockstars were the first artists to "go viral" before the term itself was known. The indie rockers built up a virtual fanbase by gigging locally and then giving away their songs on Myspace.com. The band reached widespread attention with their video of I Bet You Look Good On The Dancefloor in 2005 and later went on to have the fast-selling debut album in British music history, as it is 25 years since the launch of the World Wide Web. (credit:PA)
World Wide Web 25th anniversary(08 of15)
Open Image ModalFile photo dated 30/11/07 of parcels ready for dispatch at the Amazon.co.uk distribution centre near Milton Keynes, as the way we shop has completely and irreversibly changed in the 25 years since the launch of the World Wide Web. (credit:PA)
World Wide Web 25th anniversary(09 of15)
Open Image ModalFile photo dated 27/02/11 of Sean Parker, co-founder of music sharing site Napster, as the web prepares to celebrate its 25th birthday. (credit:PA)
World Wide Web 25th anniversary(10 of15)
Open Image ModalFile photo dated 30/07/13 of Arianna Huffington, founder of the Huffington Post, as the web prepares to celebrate its 25th birthday. (credit:PA)
World Wide Web 25th anniversary(11 of15)
Open Image ModalFile photo dated 21/09/1999 of Tesco Chief Executive Terry Leahy demonstrating the chains new 'Tesco Direct' Internet shopping facility as it is 25 years since the launch of the World Wide Web. (credit:PA)
World Wide Web 25th anniversary(12 of15)
Open Image ModalFile photo dated 30/05/12 of Martha Lane Fox co-founder of travel site lastminute.com, as the web prepares to celebrate its 25th birthday. (credit:PA)
World Wide Web 25th anniversary(13 of15)
Open Image ModalFile photo dated 26/05/11 of Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook Inc as the web prepares to celebrate its 25th birthday. (credit:PA)
World Wide Web 25th anniversary(14 of15)
Open Image ModalFile photo dated 15/01/1999 of the Prince of Wales viewing his own website, with Joel Hatherley & Katherine Leonard, both aged 10, at Montpelier Junior School's Information and Communications Technology suite, in Plymouth. as it is 25 years since the launch of the World Wide Web. (credit:PA)
World Wide Web 25th anniversary(15 of15)
Open Image ModalFile photo dated 06/11/1998 of Prime Minister Tony Blair at Trimdon Junior School, in his Sedgefield, Co Durham, constituency, with pupil Nikita Fellows where he launched a programme to get Britain's Schools 'online' with computer technology as it is 25 years since the launch of the World Wide Web. (credit:PA)
April 23: Apple launches the iPad, the world's first tablet, taking the web off in yet another mobile direction.
October: Picture editing and sharing website Instagram launched. Less than two years later, in April 2012, it was sold to Facebook for 1 billion dollars (£600 million).
February 20: Facebook pays 19 billion US dollars (£12 billion) for mobile phone messaging system WhatsApp, which was created in 2009 by two former Yahoo! employees and now has more than 450 million active users.