It was 20 years ago today: The Web

History in the making: Berners-Lee's original schematic for a client/server model for a distributed hypertext system.

Is it already 20 years since Tim Berners-Lee authored "Information Management: A proposal" and set the technology world on fire?

Back in 1989, Berners-Lee was a software consultant working at the European Organization for Nuclear Research outside of Geneva, Switzerland. On March 13 of that year, he submitted a plan to management on how to better monitor the flow of research at the labs. People were coming and going at such a clip that an increasingly frustrated Berners-Lee complained that CERN was losing track of valuable project information because of the rapid turnover of personnel. It did not help matters that the place was chockablock with incompatible computers people brought with them to the office.

"When two years is a typical length of stay, information is constantly being lost. The introduction of the new people demands a fair amount of their time and that of others before they have any idea of what goes on. The technical details of past projects are sometimes lost forever, or only recovered after a detective investigation in an emergency. Often, the information has been recorded, it just cannot be found."

So he got to work on a document, which is amazing to read with the benefit of 20-20 hindsight. But it would take Berners-Lee another couple of years before he could demo his idea. Even then, the realization of his theory had to wait until the middle of the 1990s when Jim Clark and Marc Andreessen popularized the notion of commercial Web browsing with Netscape.

Images: Berners-Lee and the dawn of the Web

And as prescient as the CERN document was, not even Berners-Lee could imagine where his basic design was about to lead. To wit, part of his very modest conclusions:

"We should work toward a universal linked information system, in which generality and portability are more important than fancy graphics techniques and complex extra facilities."

"The aim would be to allow a place to be found for any information or reference which one felt was important, and a way of finding it afterwards. The result should be sufficiently attractive to use that it the information contained would grow past a critical threshold, so that the usefulness the scheme would in turn encourage its increased use."

So it is that on Friday, Berners-Lee and other personages involved in the development of the Web will congregate at the particle physics lab to celebrate. I can't make the event, but from one side of the pond to the other, here's a virtual toast to Sir Tim Berners-Lee on a job very well done.

[anonymice]

Not to discount TBL's work -- far from it! -- if you do a web search for "Paul Otlet" you'll find that he did something equally remarkable for its time by creating a web of millions of publications linked by even more millions of hand written 3x5 inch index cards. I also just read where a company called esignet (domain name is esig.net I think) has done some new stuff with links having to do with security. Their web site shows a chronology of what thinking led up to the web.

[gerrrg]

It's just incredible how much the world has changed, how we use information, where we get information, and how we communicate our ideas to each other.

[IntelEngineer1]

I agree. Just look at the world 20 years ago. What's real funny is to watch old 1980s movies and never see one desktop computer or laptop and to also knowtice no one carrying cell phones. It's really exciting to see what the world will do in another 20 years.

[polis12]

Umm... there were desktops in the '80's mate.

[assman]

Such a simple concept.. yet the web has grown so vast in so little time.

[SalmanZahidi]

It was just the begining of a massive technological revolution.

[YoungDonald]

Amazing article. I wonder how many kids in high school think the web has always been there?

[sumanth165]

It's indeed a wonderful article.

@YoungDonald: Yes, absolutely. My young brother still thinks that web has always been there.

[Sausagebiscuit]

Thank you for helping to make information free to the world. 20 years we have come along way, and hopefully it (information) will continue to be 'free'.

[Magallanes]

I am a boy raised in the BBS era, so the Web while is a nice stuff but it is not so innovative. And BBS is over 30 year old.

Anyways, thanks for the article.

[conchchowder]

I agree. I was on The Rainforest BBS back in '85 and was using Compuserve, Dow Jones, The Source and BBs'ing all over the place. Thank goodness for Telnet and Tymnet!

I had the first research paper in my college done entirely on the "internet" using an addendum to the APA style book for research papers for electronic sources. I had to go to the computer science building and bring my own tractor-fed 8 1/2x11 paper to print on...I had to do my research at school using acoustic cups and the first laptop computer...the TRS-Model 100 with 16k ram...I expanded it to 32k with a 16k chip...I thought it was SMOKING!

Back then, a new magazine called "2600" now 2500: The Hacking Quarterly, was the ONLY guide to BBS lists and the "net". Luckily, our local bookstore, Broward News and Books, carreid (and still carries) fringe and avant garde books and magazines.

Users today don't have the appreciation for a 300 baud modem and having to set modem protocols for handshake...and long distance bills for computer use.

So happy birthday to HTTP...but not to the net.

[Jbledsoe2005]

BBSes are still around - they have moved to the Internet. They now use Telnet and SSH, but are basically the same "home grown" service that was in the 80s and 90s. Do a search for the "Telnet BBS Guide" and you'll see over 400 BBS systems around the world. Great old school stuff!

[scottthesculptor]

Pretty shure that they never envisioned it turning into the pay_for_click advertising garbage pile that it has become.

Fix the web = regulate pay_for_click
Most spam, empty sites, pop-ups etc. only exist to claim clicks to advertisers who blindly pay for the creation of more spam, pop-ups, cascading sites, porn, file sharing, etc. - for no purpose than to get more clicks.

[Len Bullard]

Charles, it is laudable because it is the one that stuck. It is also one that was not well thought through and we continue to deal with that.

There is a long history of hypermedia systems predating TimBL. While taking nothing away from the achievement, serious researchers understand what had to happen to make the web a 'singular achievement'.

[IfeanyiAsonye]

Nice article, as part of such historical information..

[Dango517]

Bravo! Sir Tim Berners-Lee for your amazing vision.

You have changed the world!

Bravo! Bravo!

Also an "at-a-boy" for Charlie who reminded us of this amazing achievement and it's creator.

Suggestion ....... Since it seems the end of the mechanical hard drive appears to be growing near (replaced by SSD drives) how about a piece on them?

[kahuna2000]

Thank You! If not for the www so many of us disabled people who scratch out a living on the internet would not have something like this to fall back on.

http://www.ellwoodcity.biz

[raptor99]

In his schematic, isn't it "refer" not "reefer"? Big difference but it could explain a great deal.

[aj37viggen]

If there's been a more significant invention in the past 20 years than the www, I don't know what it would be.

So why is this 20th anniversary simply a techie footnote, rather than a top media story?

Just goes to show how our society celebrates the wrong kind of "celebrity"...

[pentest]

This goes to show that ideas with specific uses go further than general ideas with no specific use. I wish Mr Stroustrup had more of a specific idea.

[revdano]

It should be noted that Tim Berners-Lee, good Unitarian that he is, simply put a new interface on an underlying technology. We should remember that DARPA-- the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency-- created the infrastructure that we now call the internet. In essence, DARPA created the car, Tim B-L created the dashboard.

The dashboard-- by itself-- would be useless without the car.

[bhushan bhaagii]

Thank goodness that the proposal came from a government research body, and that, too, a European body. Had it been from a company...one hardly needs to spell out how things would have panned out.
In the case of (CERN) a European body, and not a country-specific organisation, there was no strong centralisation, which would have motivated the management to keep a lid on the concept.
All said and done, it was a fortuitous set of circumstances that led to the founding of the World Wide Web.
I doff my cap to all the individuals and entities who were involved in this world-changing endeavour.
Take a bow gentlemen (and ladies!)

[arindani]

Don't forget without freeing up internet for commercial use this would not have happened in forst place!

[blah1900]

The Brits gave us two revolutions - Industrial and Information, which yielded the Steam Engine and the WWW.

The French gave us the French Revolution yielding the Guillotine!

[moviegeek65]

I thought Al Gore invented the internet :)

Seriously,it was four US universities in 1969 that laid the ground work for the internet(ARPANET).

[Thunderbuck]

He never actually claimed that, but he sort of did. Back in the 80s, Gore was instrumental in legislative efforts to give the public access to DARPAnet, which up to that time had been available exclusively to the military and academics.

[MrMurder]

I thank Berners-Lee for creating this wonderful invention or Cnet wouldn't exist.