On this page
You use the World Wide Web every day, but it began as a fix for an ordinary workplace problem: people at a big physics laboratory kept losing track of information. Tim Berners-Lee, a physics graduate, wrote a proposal to solve it. This post tells how that proposal became the web, explains what the parts of a web address mean, and ends with what students can take from how he worked.
Who is Tim Berners-Lee?
His ACM Turing Award profile gives the background. He was born on 8 June 1955 and grew up in London. Both his parents, Mary Lee Woods and Conway Berners-Lee, were mathematicians who had worked on the Ferranti Mark 1, an early commercial computer. He played with electronics as a boy but chose physics at university, earning a degree from Queen's College, Oxford, in 1976. After programming jobs at several companies he joined CERN, the European particle physics laboratory near Geneva.
What problem was he trying to solve?
In March 1989 he wrote Information Management: A Proposal. Its opening says it is about managing general information on CERN's accelerators and experiments, and about the problem of losing information on complex, changing systems. It asks how a project as large as the planned LHC era could ever keep track of itself, and suggests a distributed hypertext system: documents linked to each other, readable from anywhere.
CERN's page on the proposal records that his boss, Mike Sendall, wrote "Vague, but exciting" on it. In a note on the W3C copy, Berners-Lee says the only name he had for the idea then was "Mesh". He settled on "World Wide Web" when writing the code in 1990.
How did the first web get built?
CERN's short history of the web gives the timeline:
May 1990: a second proposal. With Belgian systems engineer Robert Cailliau it was formalised as a management proposal in November 1990.
End of 1990: the first web server and browser were running at CERN on a NeXT computer. A hand-written label on the machine read: "This machine is a server. DO NOT POWER IT DOWN!!"
First website: info.cern.ch, with the first page at http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html.
Line-mode browser: written by Nicola Pellow during a student placement at CERN, so people without a NeXT could use the web.
1991: the software reached CERN colleagues in March and was announced on internet newsgroups in August. The first US web server came online at SLAC in December.
30 April 1993: CERN made the WorldWideWeb source code available royalty-free. By late 1993 there were over 500 known web servers.
1994: Berners-Lee left CERN for MIT and founded the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).
Worked example: what does a web address tell your browser?
His W3C biography says he wrote the first web client and server in 1990, and that his specifications of URIs, HTTP and HTML were refined as the web spread. Take the first page's address apart to see all three at work:
http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html
http is the scheme. It tells the browser to use HTTP, the HyperText Transfer Protocol, the rules for asking a server for a page and getting it back.
info.cern.ch is the host, the name of the machine that holds the page. Read it right to left: ch (Switzerland), then cern, then the machine called info.
/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html is the path, which file on that machine you want.
The file that comes back is written in HTML. Its links are themselves URLs, which is what makes it a web rather than a pile of documents.
Common mistakes to avoid:
"The web and the internet are the same." The internet is the network; the web is a system of linked documents that runs on it, alongside email and file transfer.
"Berners-Lee invented the internet." CERN's history credits him with the web, which used an internet that already existed.
"HTML is a programming language." It is a markup language that describes the structure of a page.
What honours did he receive?
The ACM gave him the 2016 Turing Award "for inventing the World Wide Web, the first web browser, and the fundamental protocols and algorithms allowing the Web to scale." His W3C biography notes that he was knighted in 2004 and became a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2001.
What can a student learn from how Berners-Lee worked?
Start with a real problem near you. He was not trying to change the world; he was trying to stop his colleagues losing information.
Write the idea down and share it. A "vague" proposal was enough to get permission to try.
Build something small that works. One server, one browser and one website came before everything else.
Make it easy for others to join. A simple browser for every machine, and free software, let the web spread.
For another physicist-turned-computing pioneer, read about Alan Turing and the foundations of computing. If you want to understand an idea in computing from the ground up, the Fermi Concept Library covers every concept in physics, chemistry, biology, mathematics and computing.
Open any web page, copy its address, and label the scheme, the host and the path, just as in the example above.
