 How do you organise a vast amount of information so that you can always find what you're looking for? One way is to include a reference within a text such as a footnote that shows you a link to a related document. A similar principle is behind hypertext and hyperlinks that underlie the worldwide web. The idea of hypertext was developed in the 1960s in the United States by Ted Nelson and Douglas Engelbart, based on an original proposal in 1945 by Vannevar Bush. In 1989, an important advance was made at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research, or CERN, close to Geneva. British scientist Tim Berners-Lee proposed a distributed hypertext system that was originally called MESH. It was designed to make it easier for staff at CERN to access the centre's multitude of documents online. Working with Robert Cahill from Belgium, Berners-Lee created a system that, by allowing large existing databases to be linked together and with new ones, a place would be found for any information or reference which one felt was important and a way of finding it afterwards. The result he said should be sufficiently attractive to use that the information contained would grow past a critical threshold so that the usefulness of the scheme would in turn encourage its increased use. And that is exactly how the worldwide web expanded, not just at CERN but across the globe. Its software, along with descriptions for HTML, HTTP and the use of URLs, was developed in 1990 and the first website with information about the system went public in 1991.