To understand Web3, you first need to understand Web1 and Web2.

Short history of the Web

The original Internet was invented in the 1970s by the US government to protect its nuclear weapons from hacking.

They realised a single computer controlling all the rockets in peak Cold War was a recipe for disaster. So they built a decentralised network of multiple computers instead.

This meant the US could keep its part of the "mutually assured destruction" bargain even in case of a Soviet cyberattack.

Web1

In 1990, the Internet was a bunch of connected computers. The Web was its first application, created by Tim Berners-Lee.

Web1 was designed as a "hyperlinked information system." A giant library of data sourced together on a screen from computers all across the network for users to browse by clicking around linked text and images.

Sounds familiar?

30 years later, three billion users are connected to a much bigger, faster and more ubiquitous Web, powered by monstrous data centres. The clicking around has remained largely the same.

In its early days, the Web was a niche tool, used almost exclusively by academics. Mass adoption came five years later with the introduction of browsers like Mosaic and Microsoft Internet Explorer.

These were the good old surfing days. You'd dial in. Downloading a picture took years. Altavista was the default search engine. Nobody had thought of web design yet.

Web1 was:

• Decentralised — Powered by regular computers from regular users.
• Open-source — Anyone could build on the Web.
• Read-only — Publishing content required some technical skills, so most users were readers.

Web1's decentralised infrastructure symbolised its original ethos. Anyone could publish information of any kind, to anyone in the world, without the permission of central gatekeepers.