Tim Berners-Lee, a British scientist, invented the World Wide Web (WWW) in 1989, while working at CERN. The web was originally conceived and developed to meet the demand for automated information-sharing between scientists in universities and institutes around the world. ... These actions allowed the web to flourish.

Why is it called World Wide Web?

The first web browser - or browser-editor rather - was called WorldWideWeb as, after all, when it was written in 1990 it was the only way to see the web. Much later it was renamed Nexus in order to save confusion between the program and the abstract information space (which is now spelled World Wide Web with spaces).

What was the purpose of WWW?

It exists for just one purpose – to identify the address as a website. This is not the case with other important URL signifiers, such as a File Transfer Protocol (FTP) server (ftp) or news server (news). As such, WWW may be classified as a subdomain of a larger website. In most cases, WWW serves no technical purpose.