We recently launched Web Rewind, an interactive journey through 30 years of web history. But while building it, we kept coming back to the same question: whose history? The web’s origin story is usually told as one man’s invention. This Women’s History Month, we’re setting the record straight.

When you click a hyperlink, bookmark a page, or type a .com address, you are using technology invented by women. Yet if you Google “who invented the web”, you’ll likely see one name– Tim Berners-Lee. Same with the internet– you will see the names of Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn. The truth is messier but more interesting because it involves a lot more people, many of them women whose names have been erased from the story.

Their contributions are fundamental technologies that make the web work as we know it. Without them, there would be no clickable links, no easy way to memorize website addresses, and no web browsers that everyday people could use. The features that define what “browsing the web” means were invented by women whose names you’ve likely never heard.

Meet the forgotten founding mothers of the internet and the web.

Nicola Pellow

In 1990, 21-year-old math student Nicola Pellow was doing a work placement at CERN when she joined the World Wide Web project as one of 19 team members working with Berners-Lee. Almost immediately, she got a challenging assignment. The first web browser was built but it only worked on NeXT computers that cost over $10,000 and almost nobody owned. Pellow’s job? Build a browser that could run on literally any computer.

She learned C programming on the fly and built the Line Mode Browser in about a month. Pellow’s browser was intentionally simple. Text-only, no graphics, no mouse required and it basically worked on anything with a keyboard. You typed commands, and it showed you webpages– boring, black-and-white, but functional.

You see, this solved a fundamental problem. Berners-Lee’s browser was impressive but useless to 99.9% of potential users. Pellow’s invention made the web accessible to everyone. It became the foundation for the common code library that powered many early browsers. In fact, for years, it was the only browser that worked on all operating systems.

She wasn’t done yet. Her second stint at CERN came after she graduated. This time, she worked with Robert Cailliau on the first web browser for Macintosh computers. It was graphical, bringing visual web browsing to Mac users for the first time.

One made the web accessible. The other made it beautiful. Most importantly, without her the web would’ve stayed at CERN.

Virginia Travers

In the mid-1970s, the internet faced a fundamental problem. Separate networks couldn’t talk to each other. There was ARPANET (land-based network), the Packet Radio Network (wireless, ancestor of WiFi), and the Atlantic Packet Satellite Network (spanning multiple countries via satellite). Each spoke different ‘languages’ so they had different protocols. Data from one network simply couldn’t reach another. Almost as if iPhone users literally couldn’t call Android users. 

Virginia Travers solved this issue by writing the software for internet gateways. Think of them as translators. Data arrives from Network A speaking French, the gateway translates it to Network B’s English and then forwards it along. These gateways were the precursors to modern routers. Within the span of a year, Travers developed the first IP router and by 1976, three were operational.

In November 1977, she proved it worked. Using a research van driving around San Francisco, they sent a message that traveled through three different network types across multiple countries. At the time, it was crazy because this message covered an estimated 88,000 miles in under three seconds. This test proved the “networks of networks” concept (basically the very definition of the internet) could actually work.

Every time your data passes through routers to reach a website, you have Travers to thank. She built the roads on which the traffic (the web) runs.

Nicole Yankelovich

Nicole Yankelovich was in her early twenties when she became the lead software designer for Intermedia, a hypertext system for education that was being developed at Brown University. The problem they were solving was that at the time, every hypertext system could only link entire documents to other entire documents. Imagine if clicking a link on Wikipedia just took you to a homepage of another site, not the specific section you wanted. Pretty inconvenient.

Yankelovich and her team pioneered ‘anchor links’ which means we can now click specific words or images and jump to a specific location somewhere else. The interesting part? This was in 1985, four years before the World Wide Web was even proposed.

When HTML was being developed, the Intermedia team’s creations were incorporated into the specification. Every website’s code has a <a href=””> tag. That’s Yankelovich’s concept which was later used for the web-based implementation.

Intermedia eventually died due to funding cuts and incompatible OS updates in the early 1990s. But the concept survived. Think about how many links you’ve clicked today. They exist because of Nicole Yankelovich.

Elizabeth Feinler

Before Elizabeth Feinler’s work, internet addresses were just strings of numbers. Want to visit a website? You’d need to type something like 142.250.185.46. Imagine if instead of calling your friend Jake, you’d have to remember his social security number every time you wanted to talk. That’s what the early internet was like.

Feinler ran the Network Information Center at Stanford which was essentially the customer service center, phone book, and registry for the internet. People would call on the phone asking “how do I connect my computer to ARPANET?” and her team would walk them through it, 24/7. They maintained the internet’s ‘white pages’ (directory of people) and ‘yellow pages’ (directory of services). If you wanted to register a domain name? Her team registered them by hand.

The breakthrough came later when she and her team developed the domain naming system–  the .com, .edu, .org, .gov we still use today. It replaced those number strings which were inconvenient to remember. 

She later called the NIC “the prehistoric Google.” Before search engines existed, if you needed to find something on the internet, you contacted her team. They’d been organizing the internet since before most people knew it existed.

Radia Perlman

Radia Perlman was working at Digital Equipment Corporation when her boss gave her a challenge– solve the network loop problem.

What is the network loop problem, you ask? When you add backup connections to a network for reliability, data packets can get confused and loop forever between the same points, eventually leading to a crash. It’s like a package bouncing between two post offices forever because both think the other should handle it. Perlman figured it out in one night.

Her solution was the Spanning Tree Protocol (STP). She imagined the network as a tree with one trunk, many branches but no loops. It maps all possible paths, picks one main route, and blocks redundant paths until needed. If the main path fails, backup paths activate instantly.

Before her invention, Ethernet networks could only handle a few hundred computers in one building. But after, networks could be scaled up across multiple locations. It was standardized in 1990 and today, all office networks, schools, hospitals, and banks use a version of her code.

People call her the “Mother of the Internet.” She rejects the title. She insists that the internet was built by many people. This humility ironically contributes to her invisibility. But yes, without her work, the backup networks that keep your Zoom call stable when WiFi hiccups wouldn’t exist– networks would be too small and too fragile.

Why You’ve Never Heard These Names

We love origin stories. Tim Berners-Lee invents the web, Steve Jobs creates the iPhone, Mark Zuckerberg builds Facebook in a dorm room. These stories are simpler and cleaner. 

The truth, though, is that the internet and the web was built by teams over years. Yet as computing became lucrative in the 80s, women’s contributions were reclassified. Pellow’s browser? “Support work.” Feinler’s domain system. “Adminstrative.” Yankelovich’s concept? “Team effort.” This was hardly accidental. And this pattern continues as women leave tech at twice the rate of men, often because their work is undervalued.

But the code they wrote is still running. You’ve used their inventions a thousand times today. The web wasn’t created by a lone genius. It was built by teams, and it’s time we remembered who was actually in the room.

Internet NostalgiaOpera BrowserOpera Web RewindWeb HistoryWomen's History Month

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