Very Short Fact: On this day in 1984 Sir Tim Berners-Lee, with help from Robert Cailliau, published a formal proposal for the World Wide Web:
The World Wide Web launched in 1990–1 and took about ten years to invent, beginning with an experimental web-like computer programme, known as Enquire, written by Tim Berners-Lee in 1980 as a sort of ‘intranet’ for physicists working at CERN, the European Laboratory for Particle Physics. In 1999, Berners-Lee recalled: ‘The Web resulted from many influences on my mind, half-formed thoughts, disparate conversations, and seemingly disconnected experiments.’ He deliberately eschews the word ‘eureka’. ‘Journalists have always asked me what the crucial idea was, or what the singular event was, that allowed the Web to exist one day when it hadn’t the day before. They are frustrated when I tell them there was no “eureka” moment’, writes Berners-Lee in his memoir Weaving the Web.
[p. 102, Genius: A Very Short Introduction, by Andrew Robinson]
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Image: Tim Berners-Lee, by Athanasios Kasampalis. CC-BY-NC-ND-2.0 via Flickr.
