3 months after I graduated from Cornell, much bigger minds were hard at work. 20 years ago today, Tim Berners-Lee submitted his first proposal to CERN for the creation of what eventually would become the World Wide Web. Originally designed as a means of countering data loss at CERN. At the time, the average longevity of a researcher was just 2 years which meant that there was a high turnover which led to loss of knowledge, “…the technical details of past projects are sometimes lost forever, or only recovered after a detective investigation in an emergency. Often, the information has been recorded, it just cannot be found.”
In the resulting manifesto, entitled “Information Management: A Proposal“, Berners-Lee suggests the we “should work toward a universal linked information system.” Every student of web design should read it and understand the origins of the industry. It is an amazing path that the Web has taken in its course to ubiquity and utility but it all started, like most great inventions, as just an idea in someone’s head.
