The World Wide Web was developed in 1989 by English computer scientist Timothy Berners-Lee to enable information to be shared among internationally dispersed teams of researchers at the European Laboratory for Particle Physics (formerly known by the acronym CERN) near Geneva, Switzerland. It subsequently became a platform for related software development, and the numbers of linked computers and users grew rapidly to support a variety of endeavors, including a large business marketplace. Its further development is guided by the WWW Consortium based at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts.