CERN toasts 20th birthday of the World Wide Web

The European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) (link opens in a new window) - the birth place of the World Wide Web - is today celebrating the web’s 20th anniversary. The celebration includes talks from significant people involved in its inception, development and future, including Tim Berners-Lee – a UK computer scientist working at CERN in 1989 - who invented the Web.

Tim Berners-Lee's original WorldWide Web browser in 1993
Credit:CERN

In March 1989 Tim Berners-Lee wrote "Information Management: A Proposal," the original proposal for the World Wide Web and thus began an invention that has changed our lives and our world in such profound ways.

The Web, as it is affectionately called, was originally conceived and developed to meet the demand for automatic information sharing between CERN scientists working in different universities and institutes all over the world.

The basic idea of the WWW was to merge the technologies of personal computers, computer networking and hypertext into a powerful and easy to use global information system.

The original proposal was refined by Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau in 1990 and in 1991, an early WWW system was released to the high energy physics community via the CERN program library.

Instead of selling its new technology, CERN made the Web public and people all over the world started using it - and not just for scientific research.

Notes

As well as paying towards the cost of facilities at CERN, STFC supports the British researchers who use them. Today they form part of a 6,500-strong community of scientists and engineers from 80 countries.

See also:

The birth of the World Wide Web

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