Tim Berners-Lee’s tweet “This is for everyone” at the 2012 Summer Olympics opening ceremony. (Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:This_is_for_Everyone.jpg)
On Christmas Day, 2015, the World Wide Web celebrated 25 years since the very first web page went live on a Web server located at the Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucleaire (CERN), now known as the European Organization for Nuclear Research. The World Wide Web’s ubiquity and importance is now such that it is hard to comprehend a modern world without the Web and the great variety of applications and both commercial and not-for-profit entities it has helped spawn from Google to Facebook, eBay to Wikipedia. Whilst its later development has involved an explosion of multimedia, computer hardware and coding innovators as well as original thinkers and progressive entrepreneurs, its origins can be traced back to a small number of figures, chief among them the British computing researcher and programmer, Tim Berners-Lee.
The first web server powered up on Christmas Day 1990. The server software, written in C, ran on a NeXT computer whose case displayed a handwritten sticker stating, “This machine is a server. DO NOT POWER IT DOWN!”. (Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:First_Web_Server.jpg?uselang=en-gb)
The story of the World Wide Web’s invention is therefore Tim Berners-Lee’s story which can be traced back to the Ferranti Christmas Party held in Manchester in 1952. It was Mary Lee Woods’ first major social event at the British electronics company where she had begun working on the Ferranti Mark I computer, after arriving the previous year from five years employment as a mathematician and researcher at the Mount Stromlo Observatory in the Australian city of Canberra. There, she met another new member of the Ferranti team, mathematician and engineer, Conway Berners-Lee. The pair would marry in 1954 in London and Timothy John Berners-Lee was born the following year.
Possessing an enquiring mind from an early age, Berners-Lee was indulged and challenged by his parents who continued to work in computing for much of their lives (although his mother later became a maths teacher). Mathematics was a common fascination within the family which relocated to south-west London with puzzles set at mealtimes and a belief that maths could be hugely entertaining. For a spell when he changed schools to one close to railway tracks, Berners-Lee became obsessed with trains and constructed model railways. The need to build controllers to switch tracks and trains on his model railways led him into a lasting interest with electronics and tinkering, so much so that whilst studying physics at Queen’s College, Oxford University, Berners-Lee built his first computer from a Motorola 6800 processor, TTL gates and the innards salvaged from an old television set which he bought for around five pounds sterling (approximately US$8). Despite his continuing love of mathematics, Berners-Lee had chosen physics as his degree subject because, he thought, “that science might be more practical than maths, halfway between math and electronics. In fact it turned out to be very special subject all of itself, and fascinating for all that”.
After graduating from Oxford, Berners-Lee began working at Plessey Telecommunications Ltd. in Poole, Dorset and worked on distributed transaction systems, message relays, and bar code technology before moving to D.G. Nash in 1978 where he helped develop intelligent type setting and printing systems. Two years later, Berners-Lee now an independent software engineering contractor, arrived at CERN on a six month spell of work. He was immediately struck by how hard it was to keep track of the large numbers of people and the multiple projects they all worked on.
A great variety of different computers and systems were in place at CERN, many running different programs and operating systems with little commonality between devices. Data from experiments as well as supporting documentation and technical papers were stored on this menagerie of computers in a variety of different file formats making seeking out crucial information relevant to a particular line of research fiendishly difficult at times, a state of affairs exacerbated by CERN’s relatively high turnover of staff.
“The Web is more a social creation than a technical one. I designed it for a social effect – to help people work together – and not as a technical toy. The ultimate goal of the Web is to support and improve our weblike existence in the world. We clump into families, associations, and companies. We develop trust across the miles…” – Tim Berners-Lee in his book, Weaving The Web. (Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Tim_Berners-Lee.jpg)
Berners-Lee sought to make some sense out of the vast numbers of projects, peoples and contacts and, in his spare time, wrote a program in PASCAL that used hypertext links pioneered by the likes of Ted Nelson and Douglas Engelbart. The program built an information system where units of information about a person or project and its connections to others was stored on a ‘card’ in a database with links connecting different cards and helping to describe the varying relationships. He named the software ENQUIRE after an old encyclopaedia he recalled from his childhood, Enquire Within Upon Everything which was devised as a complete guide to all household matters.
ENQUIRE was never fully published and with his contract up at CERN, Berners-Lee moved back to England to Image Computer Systems Ltd, where he was involved in graphics software and real time control firmware. CERN came calling again in 1984, this time offering him a fellowship at the institute to work on distributed real time systems for the acquisition of scientific data and to control processes and systems at CERN. Almost immediately, Berners-Lee started thinking about developing a more general purpose and powerful version of his ENQUIRE prototype.
In 1989, he submitted a proposal for an information management system to his manager at CERN, Mike Sendall. In it, he proposed away of producing shared information which could be distributed over computer networks and employed an open architecture, able to run on any computer used within CERN regardless of their operating system. As Berners-Lee stated in his 1998 article, The World Wide Web: A very short personal history, “The dream behind the Web is of a common information space in which we communicate by sharing information. Its universality is essential: the fact that a hypertext link can point to anything, be it personal, local or global, be it draft or highly polished”. The proposal came back with Sendall’s reaction, “Vague, but exciting”, scrawled upon its top sheet, giving Berners-Lee the precious go ahead to invest time and resources in exploring the concept further.
During late 1990, Berners-Lee developed the various components that would constitute the pioneering World Wide Web, collaborating along the way with colleagues such as Robert Cailliau and graduate student Nicola Pellow. It was whilst discussing with Cailliau what to call the browser program whilst relaxing in the CERN cafeteria that Berners-Lee came up with the name World Wide Web. You could be reading this blog on The Information Mine or The Information Mesh as both names which were seriously considered but rejected, the latter because “Mesh” sounded too much like “Mess” and both because their acronym spelt “TIM” – Berners-Lee’s first name.
Belgian computer programmer Robert Cailliau was a colleague of Berners-Lee who had also prepared an independent proposal for a hypertext system to manage information. Cailliau and Nicola Pellow would write MacWWW in 1992 – the first web browser for Apple Macintosh computers. (Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Robert_Cailliau_On_Desk.jpg?uselang=en-gb)
Besides the browser, Berners-Lee fashioned three further key elements that comprised the early World Wide Web in the autumn and winter of 1990: HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) to prepare webpages for publication and which gave instructions to web browsers as to how to display them, URLs (universal resource locators which were originally called universal resource indicators) to give each piece of information an address or identity and thus a capability for it to be found and retrieved, and HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol), the protocol or set of rules to enable information transfer across different communications and computer systems. These were all up and running, albeit in simple form, on Christmas Day, 1990, when Cailliau and Berners-Lee used their computers to perform the first successful communication between a Web browser and server via the Internet. The following year, announcements and free availability of the browser was made public.
Contrary to popular belief, the World Wide Web was not an overnight success. It took months of hard lobbying by Berners-Lee, Cailliau and over converts to convince many at CERN as well as other members of the Internet community to come onboard and start using the Web. In June 1993, there was still only 130 websites throughout the world, but momentum built sharply that year especially after Berners-Lee persuaded CERN to release the project’s source code under a general licence making it freely available to all worldwide. In 1994, there were more than 2,400 websites whilst a decade on in 2004, there was an estimated 51.6 million in existence.
With commercial interest in the World Wide Web booming as fast as the numbers of websites were rocketing, there was a pressing need for an organisation to guide the nascent application and protect its core standards and principles of openness. Berners-Lee left CERN for the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science in 1994, the same year that the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) was founded with Berners-Lee its director, as a neutral and open forum where the future of the Web is discussed and new protocols agreed.
Tim Berners-Lee could have chosen to commercialise the World Wide Web from the start and potentially made a fortune but he fervently believed that for the concept to succeed, it had to be available freely to all. Perhaps the simplest illustration of Berners-Lee’ strong personal philosophy regarding the Web can be best illustrated by events in 2012 when he starred in the opening ceremony of the London 2012 Olympics. In front of an estimated global audience of 900 million, he sent a simple tweet, “This is for everyone”.
As the father of the World Wide Web, Berners-Lee has received numerous accolades. In 2004, for example, he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II, the same year that he was awarded the inaugural Millennium Technology Prize in the Finnish city of Helsinki. (Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sir_Tim_Berners-Lee.jpg)
Links for previous article series:
(1) The Beginning of a Computer: Charles Babbage, Ahead of His Time
http://www.lgcnsblog.com/inside-it/the-beginning-of-a-computer/
(2) Ada Lovelace: The First Computer Programmer
http://www.lgcnsblog.com/inside-it/ada-lovelace-the-first-computer-programmer/
(3) ENIAC: First and Fast
http://www.lgcnsblog.com/inside-it/eniac-first-and-fast/
(4) Grace Hopper: Debugging the Myths
http://www.lgcnsblog.com/inside-it/grace-hopper-debugging-the-myths/
(5) Evolution of Early Computers
http://www.lgcnsblog.com/inside-it/evolution-of-early-computers/
(6) Revealing the Future: Douglas Engelbart
http://www.lgcnsblog.com/inside-it/revealing-the-future-douglas-engelbart/
Written by Clive Gifford, LG CNS Blog’s Regular Contributor
Further Reading and References:
View Tim Berners-Lee’s initial path-finding proposal for a global hypertext system.
https://www.w3.org/History/1989/proposal.html
A short series of video interviews with Berners-Lee by the UK newspaper, The Guardian.
http://labs.theguardian.com/where-i-went-right/video/berners-lee
A short paper by Berners-Lee, entitled The World Wide Web: Past, Present and Future, giving insight into the initial Web’s architecture and operating principles.
https://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/1996/ppf.html
Weaving The Web – Tim Berners-Lee & Mark Fischetti (collaborator) (Harper Business), 2000.
A personal, often fascinating,account of how Tim Berners-Lee and colleagues developed the World Wide Web.