CERN celebrates Web anniversary

Ten years ago, CERN issued a statement declaring that a little known
piece of software called the World Wide Web was in the public domain.
That was on 30 April 1993, and it opened the floodgates to Web
development around the world. By the end of the year Web browsers were
de rigueur for any self-respecting computer user, and ten years on, the
Web is an indispensable part of the modern communications landscape.

The idea for the Web goes back to March 1989 when CERN Computer
scientist Tim Berners-Lee wrote a proposal for a ‘Distributed
Information Management System’ for the high-energy physics community.
Back then, a new generation of physics experiments was just getting
underway. They were performed by collaborations numbering hundreds of
scientists from around the world — scientists who were ready for a new
way of sharing information over the Internet. The Web was just what they
needed.

By Christmas 1990, Berners-Lee’s idea had become the World Wide Web,
with its first servers and browsers running at CERN. Through 1991, the
Web spread to other particle physics laboratories around the World, and
was as important as e-mail to those in the know.

Computer programmers started to develop ever more sophisticated
browsers, but they were mostly confined to the computer systems used by
scientists. With CERN’s statement in April 1993, it was only a matter of
time before browsers that were easy to install and that would work on
home computers made an appearance. In November that year, the US
National Center for Supercomputing Applications officially released
Mosaic, the browser that first brought the Web to the public eye.

In the early 1990s, the Web was one of several systems being developed
to make the Internet easy to use. That it succeeded where others failed
is due to many factors. CERN, with its strong history in computer
networking, its global collaborations of computer-literate scientists,
and its university-like atmosphere of intellectual openness, provided
fertile ground for Tim Berners-Lee’s idea to grow. Berners-Lee’s unique
insight in marrying hypertext to the Internet to give the Web its simple
point-and-click ease of use certainly helped. And the fact that CERN had
the foresight to ensure that the Web became part of the public domain,
and not the property of any company or individual, was decisive. In the
words of the inventor himself, "CERN’s decision to make the Web
foundations and protocols available on a royalty free basis, and without
additional impediments, was crucial to the Web’s existence. Without this
commitment, the enormous individual and corporate investment in Web
technology simply would never have happened, and we wouldn’t have the
Web today."

Ten years on, CERN is still in the vanguard of advanced computing and
networking through a new technology called the Grid. Where the Web used
the Internet to revolutionise information sharing, the Grid is set to do
the same for sharing computing resources. As lead partner in the
European Union’s DataGrid project, among others, CERN is part of a
global Grid effort. CERN’s interest is to provide the computing
resources needed for its experiments. The result for society may be that
one day plugging into powerful computing resources becomes as easy as
plugging in a table lamp.

CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, has its
headquarters in Geneva. At present, its Member States are Austria,
Belgium, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France,
Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal,
the Slovak Republic, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom.
India, Israel, Japan, the Russian Federation, the United States of
America, Turkey, the European Commission and UNESCO have observer status.

FOR MORE INFORMATION AND PHOTOS,
http://info.web.cern.ch/info/Announcements/CERN/2003/04-30TenYearsWWW/

IMAGE CAPTIONS:

[Image 1:
http://preprints.cern.ch/cgi-bin/setlink?base=PHO&categ=photo-ge&id=9806033]
Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee speaking at CERN in 1998.

[Image 2:
http://ett-div.web.cern.ch/ett-div/WPE/People/RobertCailliau/Photos/Large/NeXTScreen.gif
(174KB)]
A screenshot from an early browser from CERN.