In March 1989, British physicist Tim Berners-Lee wrote a proposal to develop a distributed information system for CERN physicists and engineers. It described a way of managing information about the accelerators and experiments at the laboratory using a system of documents linked together and accessible via the internet. His supervisor, Mike Sendall, wrote “vague, but exciting” on the cover of the proposal, and, with those words, gave the green light to an information revolution.
Berners-Lee saw the working structure of CERN as a “web” whose interconnections evolve with time. Large, collaborative projects at CERN, such as the Large Electron-Positron collider (LEP), predecessor of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) – created vast amounts of information that needed to be accessible to large numbers of people. What was needed, wrote Berners-Lee, was “a pool of information which could grow and evolve with the organisation and the projects it describes”.
Twenty years of a free, open web
http://info.cern.ch
In March 1989, British physicist Tim Berners-Lee wrote a proposal to develop a distributed information system for CERN physicists and engineers. It described a way of managing information about the accelerators and experiments at the laboratory using a system of documents linked together and accessible via the internet. His supervisor, Mike Sendall, wrote “vague, but exciting” on the cover of the proposal, and, with those words, gave the green light to an information revolution.
Berners-Lee saw the working structure of CERN as a “web” whose interconnections evolve with time. Large, collaborative projects at CERN, such as the Large Electron-Positron collider (LEP), predecessor of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) – created vast amounts of information that needed to be accessible to large numbers of people. What was needed, wrote Berners-Lee, was “a pool of information which could grow and evolve with the organisation and the projects it describes”.