How the Web Was Born
The World Wide Web has become so ubiquitous, that it is now almost easy to forget where it came from. There was a time when the internet and email were simply the tools of university geeks, and their mass use, despite the increase in use of personal computers, was still rather unheard of. But then along came Tim Berners-Lee, an English developer who, with Robert Cailliau, created the World Wide Web.
It comes as rather a surprise to many that the World Wide Web was actually invented at CERN, which is the world’s largest particle physics laboratory, based in Geneva, and which in 2008 will be switching on its Large Hadron Collider, which will hopefully reveal to us some great things about how the universe is put together.
While Berners-Lee was an independent contractor at CERN in 1980, he proposed a project based upon hypertext, that would facilitate the sharing and updating of information among scientists. So, to this end, he built a prototype system named Enquire, and by 1989 CERN was the largest Internet node in Europe. Berners-Lee had the idea of joining hypertext with the Internet, using similar ideas to those underlying the Enquire system, to create the World Wide Web and the first Web site was created at CERN, and put online in 1991.
The very first website provided an explanation about what the World Wide Web was, how one could own a browser and how to set up a web server. As other websites started to spring up, it also became the world’s first web directory, since Berners-Lee maintained a list of other websites apart from his own. Pretty soon websites started to spring up on topics of general interest to everybody, and email became increasingly common.
Berners-Lee made his idea available freely, with no patent and no royalties due, and the World Wide Web Consortium decided that their standards must be based on royalty-free technology, so they can be easily adopted by anyone.
So there we have it – the rest is history, and the technology is now taken for granted by just about everybody.
Berners-Lee is now the director of the World Wide Web Consortium which oversees the continued development of the web.