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Computer scientists, engineers and journalists gathered today on the CERN particle physics lab in the suburbs of Geneva, Switzerland, to pay homage to the a 1989 proposal by Tim Berners-Lee that would later come to be the blueprint for the World Wide Web.

"The web is not all done; this is just the tip of the iceberg. New changes are going to rock the boat even more. When we get new data out there on the web things will happen that will change the world, as things will be processed on our behalf by machines which are much more powerful," said Berners-Lee during his keynote speech today in a room packed with 500 attendees.

According to CENR, in March 1989, Tim Berners-Lee submitted a proposal for an information management system to his boss, Mike Sendall. 'Vague, but exciting', were the words that Sendall wrote on the proposal, allowing Berners-Lee to continue…

"Berners-Lee created a browser-editor with the goal of developing a tool to make the Web a creative space to share and edit information and build a common hypertext. What should they call this new browser: The Mine of Information? The Information Mesh? When they settled on a name in May 1990, it was the WorldWideWeb."

Tim Berners-Lee's original World Wide Web browser. A screen shot taken from a NeXT computer running Tim Berners-Lee's original WorldWideWeb browser. It has taken a long time for technology to catch up with Berners-Lee's original vision. The first ever web browser was also an editor, making the web an interactive medium, the problem was that it only ran on the NeXTStep operating system. With recent phenomena like blogs and wikis, the web is beginning to develop the kind of collaborative nature that its inventor envisaged from the start. Source: CERN

Related Links
Tim Berners-Lee's original proposal of the WWW W3, March 1989
About Sir Timothy John Berners-Lee Wikipedia
The website of the world's first-ever web server CERN
Happy 20th Birthday, World Wide Web Scientific American, March 13, 2009
Tim Berners-Lee: The next Web of open, linked data TED, Mar 2009

Related topics: Web