Word: cern
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...random reasons" that Berners-Lee is known as the inventor of the World Wide Web, he says. "I happened to be in the right place at the right time, and I happened to have the right combination of background." The place was CERN, the European physics laboratory that straddles the Swiss-French border, and he was there twice. The first time, in 1980, he had to master its labyrinthine information system in the course of a six-month consultancy. That was when he created his personal memory substitute, a program called Enquire. It allowed him to fill a document with...
...Berners-Lee, now back at CERN, one attraction of the Internet was that it encompassed not just CERN but CERN's far-flung collaborators at labs around the world. "In 1989, I thought, look, it would be so much easier if everybody asking me questions all the time could just read my database, and it would be so much nicer if I could find out what these guys are doing by just jumping into a similar database of information for them." In other words: give everyone the power to Enquire...
Berners-Lee wrote a proposal to link CERN's resources by hypertext. He noted that in principle, these resources could be text, graphics, video, anything--a "hypermedia" system--and that eventually the system could go global. "This initial document didn't go down well," says Berners-Lee. But he persisted and won the indulgence of his boss, who okayed the purchase of a NeXT computer. Sitting on Berners-Lee's desk, it would become the first Web content "server," the first node in this global brain. In collaboration with colleagues, Berners-Lee developed the three technical keystones...
...global hypertext system had been championed since the 1960s by a visionary named Ted Nelson, who had pursued it as the "Xanadu" project. But Nelson wanted Xanadu to make a profit, and this vastly complicated the system, which never got off the ground. Berners-Lee, in contrast, persuaded CERN to let go of intellectual property to get the Web airborne. A no-frills browser was put in the public domain--downloadable to all comers, who could use it, love it, send it to friends and even improve...
While it has not yet been built, Brandenburgsays the CERN council is expected to approve theventure early next year...