Big Optimism: 'Vague, but exciting'

Here's why you've never had to pay to use the World Wide Web.

You probably already know the name Tim Berners-Lee. If not: he’s the British computer scientist who invented the World Wide Web. That’s what he’s famous for.

But I think he did something more important and laudable — he gave it away.

Berners-Lee was born in London on June 8, 1955. His parents were both mathematicians who had worked together on the Ferranti Mark 1, one of the first commercially sold computers in the world.

He studied physics at Oxford, graduated in 1976, and spent the next few years doing what a lot of technically gifted young people did in that era — bouncing between jobs, writing software, figuring out what to build.

In 1980 he took a six-month contract at CERN — the European Organization for Nuclear Research, whose name derives from its original French acronym, Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire.

It sits outside Geneva, straddling the French-Swiss border, and it is one of the strangest and most remarkable places on earth: a campus of particle accelerators and underground tunnels where thousands of physicists from dozens of countries come to smash subatomic particles together at nearly the speed of light, trying to understand what everything is made of.

They produce staggering amounts of data. In 1980, sharing that data between researchers was a genuine problem — different computers, different operating systems, different institutions, none of them talking to each other easily.

Information got lost, and when people left they basically took their knowledge with them. The institutional memory of one of the world’s great scientific organizations lived largely inside individual human heads.

Berners-Lee decided to do something about it. He wrote a small program for keeping track of the connections between people, projects, and documents — a personal tool, essentially, built on the concept of hypertext, which allowed documents to link to one another.

He called it ENQUIRE, after a Victorian household encyclopedia called *Enquire Within Upon Everything* that he remembered from childhood.

Then his contract ended and he left, and ENQUIRE stayed behind on a CERN computer for four years.

In 1984, Berners-Lee came back in a permanent role, and he found that the data problem was even worse — CERN was bigger, the data was more complex, the researchers were more dispersed.

He spent several years thinking about it, and in March 1989 he wrote a formal proposal: a system of linked documents that could live on multiple computers simultaneously, that anyone with the right software could navigate, that would be built on top of the internet infrastructure that already existed.

He called it a “mesh.” Later he called it the World Wide Web. His supervisor, Mike Sendall, read the idea and wrote four words in the margin: *”Vague, but exciting.”*

That was enough. By the end of 1990 he had built a working version — a web server, a browser, and the first website, all running on a NeXT computer on his desk at CERN.

Someone taped a note to the computer in red ink: *”This machine is a server. DO NOT POWER IT DOWN.”*

For the next two years it grew quietly. Other physicists started using it, and other institutions picked it up. The first web server outside Europe came online at Stanford in December 1991. By 1993 there were perhaps 50 websites in the entire world.

The internet existed, and had existed for decades — but it was complicated, technical, and forbidding to anyone without serious training. What Berners-Lee had built was a layer on top of it that made it navigable by ordinary people.

That meant he now had a decision to make.

Berners-Lee had built something that any reasonable person could see was going to be enormous, with staggering commercial possibilities.

A system that could eventually connect every computer on earth, carrying information, commerce, communication — and he held the patents! Or at least, he could have, structuring it so that every website, every browser, every web server owed him something.

On April 30, 1993, 33 years ago this week, CERN instead released the World Wide Web software into the public domain — no patents, no royalties, no licensing fees.

Free, forever, for every person and institution on earth to use, build on, and improve.

The decision to release it like this was Berners-Lee’s, and he’s been undramatic about it in the years since, framing it less as generosity than as logic.

“Had the technology been proprietary, and in my total control,” he said, “it would probably not have taken off. You can’t propose that something be a universal space and at the same time keep control of it.”

Maybe. But plenty of people have looked at something universal and tried to own it anyway.

Within two years of that April day there were 10,000 websites. Within five years, millions. Within a decade, it had become the largest communications system in human history — carrying more information, connecting more people, and generating more economic activity than anything ever built. There is almost no corner of modern life it has not touched.

Tim Berners-Lee was knighted in 2004. He is 70 years old and still working — currently focused on giving people back control over their own data, which he considers the web’s unfinished business. He has received every honor his field can offer.

But he has never collected a royalty.

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7 optimistic moments from history this week

• April 26: “Well, the people, I would say.” — Jonas Salk, when asked by journalist Edward R. Murrow who owned the patent on the polio vaccine, which began its first mass trial on this day in 1954 — with nearly two million American children, known as the Polio Pioneers, receiving shots.

• April 27: “Once more, we affirmed a truism of human history: that the people are their own liberators.” — Nelson Mandela, who on this day in 1994 voted in South Africa’s first fully democratic election, held over three days, which drew 22 million voters of all races. Mandela, then 75, was elected president.

• April 28: “The Kon-Tiki expedition opened my eyes to what the ocean really is. It is a conveyor and not an isolator.” — Thor Heyerdahl, the Norwegian explorer who on this day in 1947 set sail from Callao, Peru, on a hand-built balsa wood raft with five companions and a parrot named Lorita, attempting to prove that ancient South Americans could have reached Polynesia by drifting with the wind and current.

• April 29: “The first institution found anywhere in the world to provide a higher education in the arts and sciences for male youth of African descent.” — Horace Mann Bond, class of 1923 and Lincoln University’s first Black president, describing the school he attended, which received its charter from the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania on this day in 1854 — making it the first degree-granting HBCU in the United States.

• April 30: “I was summoned by my country, whose voice I can never hear but with veneration and love.” — George Washington, from his first inaugural address, delivered on this day in 1789. A witness noted that even Washington trembled as he spoke. He had not wanted the job, but he had been recruited and elected unanimously.

• May 1: “It will never be finished.” — William Lamb, chief architect of the Empire State Building, which opened on this day in 1931, only 410 days after construction began. It was the tallest building in the world for 40 years. Lamb reportedly said that every time he looked at the building, he saw something he wished he’d done differently.

• May 2: “We are the ship. All else the sea.” — Andrew “Rube” Foster, the son of a Texas sharecropper who became one of the greatest pitchers of his era, and who on this day in 1920 launched the Negro National League’s first game — the first successful professional baseball league for Black Americans. Foster borrowed the motto from Frederick Douglass.