The Worldwide Telescope was started by amateur astronomer Curtis Wong who grew up in Los Angeles with a deep desire to explore the amazing Sky he saw in magazines like Sky and Telescope. Of course between the city lights and the smog, all he could see with his 60mm refractor were the moon, a few planets and nebulae. What he really wanted was a gigantic telescope with a dark sky and a Harvard astronomer by his side to guide and explain what he was looking at.
When he grew up, Wong became an interactive media producer creating some of the first CD-ROMs, such as Multimedia Beethoven in 1991. He started a new CD-ROM project called John Dobson’s Universe with guided tours by Dobson explaining deep sky objects in the context of a zoomable night sky featuring the beautiful constellation imagery of Akira Fuji and object imagery from multiple sources. Unfortunately funding for that project got cancelled but Wong continued to think about how it could be done with the emergence of the World Wide Web.
By 2000, Wong was at Microsoft Research where he worked with big data computer scientist Jim Gray and astronomer Alex Szalay from Johns Hopkins. Gray and Szalay were working on software to make data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey available on-demand to researchers and the public and they wrote a seminal paper together envisioning "The World-Wide Telescope, an Archetype for Online Science" [http://arxiv.org/ftp/cs/papers/0403/0403018.pdf]. In working with Gray and Szalay, Wong realized that all the elements were finally becoming available to create his astronomy project, then code-named "The Universe Project."
In 2005, Wong attended a Kavli workshop at The University of Chicago called The Visualization of Astrophysical Data and presented his vision for the Universe Project. Wong's slides are still online at the conference site, here: https://kicp-workshops.uchicago.edu/visualization2005/. Also attending the workshop was Alyssa Goodman, a Harvard Astronomy professor with long-standing interests in data visualization and innovation in education. Goodman and Wong became fast friends, and Goodman promised to help with the "Universe" project, if it were ever possible to fund its creation.
In 2006, Wong got the go-ahead to make the Universe Project real, and in so-doing he had the great fortune to collaborate with Jonathan Fay, an extraordinary software architect and amateur astronomer himself. The software was built during 2006-8 with Wong designing the experience and Fay developing technical architecture and code, while Goodman and other professional astronomers provided input and advice on content and how researchers and the public might use it.
The software was renamed "WorldWide Telescope" (WWT) in honor of Jim Gray who had been lost at sea in early 2007. WWT was first previewed at the 2008 TED Conference by Roy Gould, science education expert at the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. S&T featured WWT in 2008, in an article by Stuart Goldman, who explained that WWT is so feature-laden that to learn it, one should "Watch the introductory tours to learn your way around the program — and then left- and right-click on everything!" This is still very good advice--and there's much more to find now than there was in 2008!