The NYT has made its archive of articles freely available, permitting some interesting searches. The first mention of the worldwide web, “a collection of computer networks that does a little of what a national data highway would do and that already has hundreds of thousands of computer users,” appears to have been in this article from February 1993.
The Internet is a web of networks with shared software standards, allowing users on one network to reach anywhere into a global thicket. Created by the Pentagon, the Internet was originally limited to academic and corporate researchers and government officials. It began as a simple mechanism for sharing data, using remote computers and exchanging electronic mail. Now it contains large and small, commercial and nonprofit networks that offer a remarkable array of services.
By December of the next year the website that would evolve into this one (at that time the site of Mercury House publishing, on which I kept a corner for my personal stuff) would be live. Its first iteration was created by one of our interns, Joshua Grossnickle, who went on to write The Handbook of Online Marketing Research together with Oliver Raskin; they are the principals of SiteCentric.