The World Wide Web (WWW) on Friday marked its 20th anniversary and its founders admitted there were bits of the phenomenon they did not like: advertising and “snooping.”
The creation of the Web by British computer software genius Tim Berners-Lee and other scientists at the European particle physics laboratory (CERN) paved the way for the Internet explosion that has changed our daily lives.
Berners-Lee and former colleagues such as Robert Cailliau, who originally set up the system to allow thousands of scientists around the world to swap, view and comment on their research, regardless of distance or computer system, took part in commemorations on Friday at the laboratory.
“Back then there were 26 Web servers. Now there are 10 to the power [of] 11 pages. That’s as many as the neurons in your brain,” said Berners-Lee, who still has an active hand in the Web’s development.
In March 1989, the young Berners-Lee handed his supervisor in Geneva a document entitled “Information Management: a proposal.”
The supervisor described it as “vague, but exciting” and gave it the go-ahead, although it took a good year or two to get off the ground and serve nuclear physicists in Europe initially.
Former CERN systems engineer Cailliau, who teamed up with Berners-Lee, said: “It was really in the air, something that had to happen sooner or later.”
They drew up the global hypertext language — which is behind the “http” on Web site addresses and the links between pages — and came up with the first Web browser in October 1990, which looks remarkably similar to the ones used today.
“Everything that people talk about today, blogs and so on, that’s what we were doing in 1990, there’s no difference. That’s how we started,” Cailliau told Swiss radio RSR.
The WWW technology was first made available for wider use on the Internet from 1991 after CERN was unable to ensure its development and the organization made a landmark decision two years later not to levy royalties.
“Without that, it would have died,” Berners-Lee said.
Cailliau still marvels at developments like Wikipedia that allow knowledge to be exchanged openly around the Web, but never imagined that search engines would take on the importance they have assumed today.
But the commercial development of the Web irritates some of the founders, who prize its open and universal nature.
“There are some things I don’t like at all, such as the fact that people have to live off advertising,” said Caillau, who preferred the idea of direct “micro payments” to information providers.
“And there’s the big problem of identity, of course, the trust between the person who is consulting and the person who provides the page, as well as the protection of children,” he said.
Berners-Lee, now a researcher at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the US and a computer science professor at Southampton University in Britain, still heads the World Wide Web Consortium that coordinates development of the Web.
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