HTTP/History

The history of the HyperText Transfer Protocol dates back to around 1989 with the invention of the World Wide Web.

Invention of the World Wide Web
Sir Tim Berners-Lee, while working at CERN in 1989, wrote a proposal to build a hypertext system over the Internet, now called the World Wide Web. Built over the existing TCP and IP protocols, it consisted of four building blocks:
 * HyperText Markup Language, a textual format to represent hypertext documents
 * HyperText Transfer Protocol, a simple protocol to exchange said documents
 * A Web browser that displays these documents. The first web browser was called WorldWideWeb.
 * A server to give access to the document, an early version of httpd.

These four building blocks were completed by the end of 1990, and the first servers were already running outside of CERN by early 1991. On August 6, 1991, Tim Berners-Lee's post on the newsgroup alt.hypertext is considered now as the official start of the World Wide Web as a public project.

HTTP/0.9
Also called the one-line protocol, HTTP/0.9 (given the name to differentiate it from later HTTP versions) was very simple: a request consisted of a single line and started with the only possible method  followed by the path to the resource. For example: GET /example.html

Unlike subsequent versions of HTTP, there were no headers, status codes, or error codes. It was very limited in what it could do: only HTMTL files were transmitted.