May 3rd 1993 saw the Directors at CERN – The European Organisation for Nuclear Research – sign-off on the paperwork which made the World Wide Web a public commodity.
In a document entitled “Statement concerning CERN W3 software release into public domain”, the world became custodians of the entirety of the components of the World Wide Web – For Free!
How it all started
Back in 1989, Tim Berners-Lee, a computer scientist working as CERN wrote a document in an an attempt to persuade CERN management that a global hypertext system was in CERN’s interests as a way of cataloging the organisations ever expanding library of research documents.
The document was entitled “Information Management: A proposal” and it discusses the problems of loss of information about complex evolving systems and derives a solution based on a distributed hypertext system.
Initially calling the system “Mesh”, Tim Berners-Lee’s creation would eventually become one of the most important inventions in the history of mankind as the World Wide Web.
By Paul Clarke – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=53878695
Development of the WWW
Between 1990 and 1992, Berners-Lee worked on bringing his proposal to life and began coding the pieces that would eventually become the WWW.
Using an NeXT cube computer, Tim started to develop a hypertext GUI browser and editor. By the end of 1990 a working program was produced and demonstrated to CERN staff.
In 1991 the “Line Mode browser” was made available to selected users and more widely to global Internet users by 1992. The program was initially made available from CERN via FTP.
In March of 1993, WWW traffic made up 0.1% of traffic on the backbone of the Internet.
This is for everyone
Continuing the ethos of the Internet creators, the CERN directors decided not to keep the code for the WWW as a proprietary technology – a decision which arguably changed the course of history, for if they had maybe the WWW would not have been the success which it is today. The directors decided on April 30th to release the source code – the process being formalised on May 3rd, 1993.
The famous quote which sparked the creation of the Internet was also used by Tim Berners-Lee to insist that the WWW was for everyone on the planet.
Berners-Lee famously tweeted the phrase during the opening ceremony of the 2012 London Olympic games. The tweet was relayed back to the olympic stadium where LED panels displayed the message to the audience of ~900 Million viewers.
