The World Wide Web Proposed — CERN

In March 1989, Tim Berners-Lee, a software engineer at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, handed his manager Mike Sendall a document titled Information Management: A Proposal.

About twenty A4 pages. It proposed a hypertext system to solve a problem CERN's researchers had long been living with: scientists rotated through CERN constantly, and the instrument specifications, papers, and lab notes were scattered across personal files, mainframes, and ad-hoc databases. No one held the whole picture.

After Sendall finished reading, he wrote a short comment in the margin.

Vague, but exciting...

Why CERN

Why, of all places, did the Web emerge in a physics lab outside Geneva?

Two reasons.

One: CERN was conducting what was probably the most internationally distributed intellectual collaboration in the world. The LEP collider (operational from 1989, ancestor of the LHC) involved more than a thousand physicists from over twenty countries. They came to CERN for a few years, returned to their home institutions, then came back. Information that lived in one person's head and disappeared with them was already a real, daily problem.

Two: CERN ran a large fleet of computers with multiple operating systems coexisting—VMS, UNIX, Mac OS, others. A system that could link from anywhere to anywhere, across document formats and machines, was not a thought experiment at CERN. It was an operational requirement.

Implementation on the NeXTcube

Sendall approved the work about a year after the proposal, in September 1990. The approval came in the form of permission to use the NeXTcube that Berners-Lee had just bought (a NeXT workstation, from Steve Jobs's post-Apple company) as a 'pilot machine'.

Between October and December 1990, Berners-Lee implemented four things:

1. HTTP — the HyperText Transfer Protocol, by which client and server exchange hypertext documents.
2. HTML — the HyperText Markup Language, in which documents and links are written.
3. URL — a uniform way of naming any resource on the network.
4. WorldWideWeb — the world's first web browser (which was also an editor).

The world's first web server, info.cern.ch, was that NeXTcube. Reportedly a label had been stuck to its case: "This machine is a server. DO NOT POWER IT DOWN!!" The label is now in CERN's museum.

The Decision Not to Commercialise

On 30 April 1993, CERN officially announced that the Web's technical specifications would be released royalty-free.

This is one of the most consequential decisions in the Web's history. At the same time, commercial hypertext systems were on offer—Microsoft's OLE in Word, IBM's Hyperwave, others. Had CERN chosen to license the Web and run it as a paid product, it is likely the Web would have been displaced by some other, probably more fragmented and more closed, network.

Berners-Lee himself opposed commercialisation consistently. He moved to MIT in 1994 and founded the W3C, the World Wide Web Consortium, to lead Web standardisation. Knighted by the Queen in 2004; ACM Turing Award in 2016.

Thirty Years On

By 2026, the Web has an estimated five billion users and more than two billion sites. The first HTML document Berners-Lee wrote at CERN is still served from info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html, readable from anywhere in the world.

The original proposal document, with Sendall's "Vague, but exciting..." in the margin, is held in CERN's archive. Sendall died in 2018. His phrase will likely outlive him as perhaps the most understated 'sign-off' in the history of computing.