How the World Got Wired · The Web, Given Away

The Problem at CERN

Tim Berners-Lee arrived at CERN in 1984. He was twenty-nine years old. He was a software engineer, not a physicist, and his job was to help the scientists keep track of their work.

There was a lot of work to keep track of.

CERN at that time had several thousand scientists — some who worked there full time, many more who visited from universities around the world to use the experiments for a few weeks or months at a time. Each scientist had documents. Each scientist had data. Each scientist had projects, and collaborators, and notes, and ideas. The information was scattered across hundreds of computers — different kinds of computers, made by different companies, running different software, in different buildings, in different countries. There was no good way to find anything. If you wanted to know what some Italian physicist had written about a particular detector last year, you might have to find the right person, ask them what computer it was on, learn how to log into that computer, learn how to find the file, and read it in whatever format it happened to be saved in. Often you would just give up.

Berners-Lee thought a lot about this. He had been thinking about it, actually, since he was a graduate student. Years earlier, in 1980, he had written a small program for himself called ENQUIRE, which let him store notes about projects and people and create links between them. If you opened the note for a person, you could click a link to see all the projects that person worked on. If you opened a project, you could click to see who else was on it. It worked beautifully — for one person, on one computer.

What if, Berners-Lee began to wonder in the late 1980s, you could do the same thing across all of CERN? What if every document on every computer could have links to other documents, on other computers, anywhere in the building, anywhere in the world? What if, by clicking a single link, you could jump straight from a physics paper in Geneva to the data file it referred to in Tokyo, without having to know what computer either one was on?

He thought about it for years. In March of 1989, he wrote up his idea in a short proposal and gave it to his boss, a man named Mike Sendall.

Sendall read it. He could not quite tell whether the idea was brilliant or ridiculous. He wrote a note on the front cover of the proposal, in handwriting that is now famous:

Vague, but exciting…

He gave Berners-Lee permission to work on it. Not as an official project. As a side thing. In his spare time.

That is how the World Wide Web got started.

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