The Internet Chronicles – Part 6 of 12: The Man Who Gave the Web to the World

Andrei Mihai

We take it for granted nowadays, but the internet is one of the most impactful inventions of modern times – possibly even of all time. But how did it all start? The story of the internet is a fascinating journey through the minds of visionary thinkers and relentless innovators, many of them coming from mathematics and computer science. In this 12-part series, we will dive into some of the stories and contributions of the trailblazers who laid the foundations for the interconnected world we live in today.

Previously, we explored the revolution of interactive computing and the people trying to create a structure for the internet. The infrastructure was slowly improving in scope and capacity. Yet, a unifying drive was missing.

There was a need for a global, open, and robust “map” for the internet, a “web” that would link everything together. This web, surprisingly, is tightly linked to particle research.

Nuclear Research and the Internet

The European Organization for Nuclear Research, known as CERN, currently hosts the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world’s largest particle accelerator. But CERN has been a thriving research center for decades. Ever since its establishment in 1954, it has been one of the top research institutes in Europe and the world. By 1980, thousands of researchers were working with CERN, either on-site or from their own laboratories and research centers. Many were doing cutting edge research.

But transferring information from one group to another wasn’t the easiest thing in the world. At the time, that required a login, commands, and user manuals that explained how to do it. It could take anywhere between a few minutes and a few hours. This was more than just a minor inconvenience, it was a real problem. Knowledge, time, and effort were being lost because some systems were incompatible and different researchers worked in different ways.

Tim Berners-Lee, who was trained as a physicist, thought there should be a better way. Berners-Lee, who would go on to win the ACM A.M. Turing Award, had a history with computers as the son of two mathematicians and computer scientists who worked on the Ferranti Mark 1, the first commercially-built computer. He was familiar with the state of the art at the time and thought that what CERN most needed wasn’t better hardware, but a better way to share information.

He first worked as an independent contractor at CERN in 1980. While there, he proposed a project based on the concept of hypertext, which was inspired by Douglas Engelbart’s “Mother of All Demos” (which we covered in our previous installment). Hypertext is essentially text displayed on a computer with references (hyperlinks) to other text that the reader can immediately access. Berners-Lee left CERN in the same year, only to return as a research fellow in 1984.

Things stayed largely quiet for a few years. Then, in 1989, Berners-Lee submitted a document to his boss, titled Information Management: A Proposal. Scribbled on the cover was a now-famous phrase: “Vague but exciting.”

This proposal was the skeleton of what would become the World Wide Web: a universal, decentralized, and open system for linking documents and sharing information.

The World’s First Website

Berners-Lee’s idea wasn’t the first one of this sort. Other projects, like Ted Nelson’s Xanadu, also foresaw the hypertext as foundational for the internet. But Berners-Lee was more practical. He focused on ideas and concepts that were already available, synthesizing them and applying them across the internet.

In particular, Berners-Lee pioneered three concepts that are still foundational for the internet today:

• HTML (Hypertext Markup Language). This is essentially the code that formats web pages and creates links. It’s not a programming language, but rather a markup language which is used to build webpages.
• HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol). This is the protocol that defines how web browsers and servers communicate. It is essentially an application layer protocol that operates on top of other network protocols like TCP/IP.
• URL (Uniform Resource Identifier/Locator). This is the web address that tells the system where a page is.

By the end of 1990, he had also built the first browser/editor and the first web server. The browser was called WorldWideWeb (later Nexus), and you could use it to view and edit pages. Berners-Lee envisioned the web as a collaborative space, not just a digital bookshelf.

The world’s first website was info.cern.ch, which you can still view today using a modern browser. It was a simple page that explained what the World Wide Web is and how you can use it.

The concept was appealing and it caught on in academic circles, but it may have fizzled had it not been for one key decision. In 1993, CERN released the core web code into the public domain. They made it completely free, no strings attached. Anyone could use it, modify it, build on it.

This opened the floodgates. Developers started writing new browsers, like Mosaic, which added graphics and made the web friendly to non-programmers. The first commercial websites emerged not long after that. The idea that anyone could create and publish on the web without asking permission was revolutionary and appealing to the world.

The World Wide Web had opened up.

The Web, the Internet, and the World

The Internet and “the Web” are commonly used interchangeably, but they are not the same thing. The internet is the infrastructure, all the cables, the routers, and the software protocols like TCP/IP. The web is one application that runs on top of it. The internet would be the roads and highways, and the Web would be the same map that everyone is using to get around and navigate. Berners-Lee built that map, and also made some supermarkets and libraries along the way.

Remarkably, Berners-Lee did not patent his invention or try to reap any serious profits from it. In fact, he seems more concerned with making sure the internet is operating smoothly and fairly than making a profit. In 1994, he founded the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) to ensure that the Web remains open and standardized. The W3C has since developed HTML5, CSS and other standards that ensure all browsers and websites can communicate and work together no matter who makes them.

Without the World Wide Web, the internet might have stayed a tool for scientists and specialists, or at least have been delayed significantly. In recent years, Berners-Lee has grown increasingly alarmed at how the Web has evolved. He is alarmed by the rise of surveillance, censorship, misinformation, and the concentration of power among a few large companies.

“Everything we do … to make the web more powerful, it means we increase the digital divide,” Berners-Lee, 63, told the opening of the ninth edition of the Web Summit. “We’ve an obligation to look after both parts of the world.”

His latest project is Solid, a decentralized system where you own your data in a personal storage unit (or “Pod”) and decide which apps can access it. It is a bold attempt to reverse the power imbalance and give control back to users. For now, the project faces major challenges, including a very low adoption rate. But it goes to show that Berners-Lee is still involved in the future of the internet.

As Berners-Lee puts it, “The Web was supposed to empower individuals. We lost that a bit along the way. Now, we have a chance to get it back.”

But let us not get ahead of ourselves. The Web gave everyone the opportunity to participate in the internet, but there was a real risk of the entire structure “collapsing under its own weight.” In the next installment, we will look at some of the innovations that kept the internet efficient and nimble, despite its colossal size.

The post The Internet Chronicles – Part 6 of 12: The Man Who Gave the Web to the World originally appeared on the HLFF SciLogs blog.