The software and website were developed in 1994 by Cunningham in order to make the exchange of ideas between programmers easier. This concept was based on the ideas developed in
HyperCard stacks that Cunningham built in the late 1980s. On March 25, 1995, he installed the software on his company's (Cunningham & Cunningham) website: c2.com. The site was frequently referred to by its users as simply "Wiki"; users of the early network of wiki sites that followed in the 1990s and 2000s followed a convention that using the word with a capitalized
W referred exclusively to WikiWikiWeb. In December 2014, WikiWikiWeb came under the attack of
vandals, and had to be put into a read-only state. On February 1, 2015, Cunningham announced that the Wiki had been rewritten as a
single-page application and migrated to the new
Federated Wiki. When moved to read-only, the WikiWikiWeb's
Welcome Visitors page contained the following description in the first two paragraphs: == Etymology ==