While this very newspaper was on a two-week break from publication, a milestone anniversary passed by, largely unnoticed outside of a small circle of writers in the technology sector.
I’m thinking of the 30th anniversary of an event that has affected pretty much everyone reading this column, and almost surely everyone known to my readers. It was an event that likely today affects or occupies multiple hours of your day.
That event was the establishment of the WorldWideWeb (yes, its name was one word originally) in August 1991, in two somewhat obscure offices in Geneva at CERN, the European centre for nuclear research, perhaps better known as the home of the Large Hadron Collider. Those two offices became the underpinning of the graphically based internet, which today we might refer to as the beginnings of the web.
Using NeXT workstations produced by Steve Jobs after his unceremonious exit from Apple, two researchers at CERN set about producing a system that would simplify the sharing of data from the complex physics experiments conducted there. In the process of doing this the researchers introduced the idea of a URL, the addressing structure that makes it possible to retrieve data files from any web-connected computer on the planet, and they invented HTML, hypertext markup language, the language in which web pages are structured.
Notably, the researchers and CERN as their employer decided to forgo any royalties or patent protection for their invention, in the process ensuring the rapid adoption of their technologies across the world. Their two web server computers soon became hundreds and, in short order, millions.
One of the two NeXT workstations that made up that initial web is still at CERN. The other is in London. Outside of CERN just one name is generally ascribed to the seminal work in those two offices. But at CERN, two names feature equally when it comes to the development of the WorldWideWeb: Tim Berners-Lee from Great Britain and Robert Cailliau from Belgium.
In 1989 Berners-Lee wrote the landmark paper that set in motion the creation of the World Wide Web, eventually written as three words. In the subsequent two years Berners-Lee and Cailliau developed the protocols and structure that would enable the many researchers at CERN and satellite facilities around the world to easily share and access data through web pages.
It was the development of the hypertext transfer protocol, HTTP, that was the key step in making it easy to distribute data and for scientists to work collaboratively irrespective of location by using hypertext or hyperlinks accessed in a graphical environment with, you guessed it, a web browser.
For a short while, the WorldWideWeb, in its one-word form, was pretty much confined to CERN and high-energy particle physics facilities around the globe. The initial software ran only on the expensive workstations found at universities. However, in 1993 Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina, students at the University of Illinois and part-time employees of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, set about creating an improved web browser, initially for Unix machines, but by the spring of 1993 suitable for PC and Mac computers.
This new browser, called Mosaic, and which crucially incorporated the ability to display images directly in web pages, spurred the rapid growth of internet technologies, and became the foundation for subsequent browsers such as Netscape, Internet Explorer, Safari, and Google Chrome.
I was fortunate to spend a month at CERN in 2011. My photograph of the plaque recognizing the world-changing work that occurred there accompanies this column.
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