World Wide Web Goes Public — Birth of the Digital Age
Tim Berners-Lee put the first website online in August 1991, and CERN placed the whole system in the public domain two years later. He was a British physicist working at the European particle physics laboratory, where thousands of scientists from dozens of institutions arrived, worked on incompatible systems, and left, taking the knowledge of what was where with them. His proposal of March 1989 was for a way of linking documents across machines, and his supervisor's note on it — vague but exciting — is the most quoted line in the history of the internet. The internet already existed and had for two decades, with email, file transfer and newsgroups. What the web added was three things that together made it usable by anyone: a way of addressing any document anywhere, a protocol for requesting it, and a markup language with links embedded in the text. He wrote the first browser, which was also an editor, on a NeXT machine that still carries a handwritten label asking people not to switch it off. The decision that mattered most was commercial. CERN issued a statement in April 1993 releasing the protocols with no royalty of any kind, on Berners-Lee's insistence, at a moment when competing systems such as Gopher were announcing licence fees. Mosaic appeared the same year and made it graphical. The number of websites went from one to millions in five years. Berners-Lee has spent the decades since arguing about what it became. He has said that the thing he would change is the double slash in web addresses, which he included out of convention and which has been typed a great many billion times since for no reason at all.
- Year: 1991 CE
- Category: Scientific
