George Patterson wrote:
Ron Garret wrote:

HTTP was first described by Berners-Lee et al. in RFC 1945 in May 1996.


HTTP was invented in 1990. One of the earliest standards publications
came out in 1992. Berners-Lee had an HTML browser editor out by 1992.

http://inventors.about.com/library/inventors/blhtml.htm

I'm not much of a historian, but I remember the work going on at SRI
International (nee, Stanford Reasearch Institute) in the late 1970s.
This was in the group headed by Doug Engelbart who invented WYSISYG
edit-compile-debug developments, the mouse, chordic keyboards, etc.
"Hyper text" was just beginning to span networks back then. A link
simply expanded to the associated file and there was no interpreter
looking for tags. That's what Berners-Lee added.