Is the web the same thing as the internet?

No. The internet is the global network of connected computers; the web is one service that runs on top of it, just as email and videoconferencing do. Both histories, the internet's and that of hypertext, go back significantly further than the web. When you click a link, you are using the web. When your phone fetches a message, that may be something else on the same network.

The web was Tim Berners-Lee's idea. He worked at CERN, the European physics laboratory, and he was frustrated by how hard it was to find information stored on different computers. On 12 March 1989 he submitted a memo to CERN management titled "Information Management: A Proposal". It attracted little interest, but his manager encouraged him to start building it anyway. His breakthrough was to marry hypertext, text with clickable links, to the internet. By December 1990 his team had built a browser, a server, and the very first website, which was about the project itself.

What made it spread was a decision about money. In 1993 CERN announced that the web would be free to anyone, with no fees due, and released the code into the public domain. It came two months after a rival system, Gopher, stopped being free to use, and it set off a rapid shift away from Gopher. Berners-Lee never patented his idea either. Later in 1993 a browser called Mosaic made it easy to mix pictures with text, and historians generally agree it was a turning point.