August 13, 2013
ALWAYS SURPRISING TO BE REMINDED HOW RECENT AN INNOVATION IT IS:
Remembering the Day the World Wide Web Was Born : What drove Tim Berners-Lee to imagine this game-changing model for information sharing, and will its openness be its undoing? (Larry Greenemeier, March 12, 2009, Scientific American)
Twenty years ago this month, a software consultant named Tim Berners-Lee at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (better known as CERN) hatched a plan for an open computer network to keep track of research at the particle physics laboratory in the suburbs of Geneva, Switzerland. Berners-Lee's modestly titled "Information Management: A Proposal," which he submitted to get a CERN grant, would become the blueprint for the World Wide Web.The Web was not an overnight success. In fact, it took nearly two years before Berners-Lee--with help from CERN computer scientist Robert Cailliau and others--on Christmas Day 1990 set up the first successful communication between a Web browser and server via the Internet. This demonstration was followed by several more years of tireless lobbying by Berners-Lee, now 53, to convince professors, students, programmers and Internet enthusiasts to create more Web browsers and servers that would soon forever change the world of human communication.
Posted by Orrin Judd at August 13, 2013 12:12 AM
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