In March 1989 at CERN, a guy called Tim-Berners Lee had an idea about how to get control over the sprawling documentation mess at the organization. CERN is the European Particle Physics Laboratory. The name comes from French, Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire.

CERN already had a document problem, and the scale of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) project was going to make it much worse. As it happened, Tim had some experience with a technology that he felt could be general enough to work with the whole sprawl of systems already in use, and even future ones. His experience was from almost a decade earlier:

In 1980, I wrote a program for keeping track of software with which I was involved in the PS control system. Called Enquire, it allowed one to store snippets of information, and to link related pieces together in any way. To find information, one progressed via the links from one sheet to another, rather like in the old computer game "adventure". I used this for my personal record of people and modules. It was similar to the application Hypercard produced more recently by Apple for the Macintosh. A difference was that Enquire, although lacking the fancy graphics, ran on a multiuser system, and allowed many people to access the same data.

He decided to try and convince CERN's management that a global hypertext system was in CERN's interest. At the time, he called it "Mesh". The following year, he wrote the first web client and server, and also came up with a better name, the "World Wide Web."

The original document was apparently a MacWord document, because...well, there wasn't a World Wide Web, or HTML yet. But it has been converted to HTML and you can read it: Information Management: A Proposal. The document is only dated March 1989 without a day, so I picked a convenient day this March, thirty years later, to publish this anniversary post.

Another extract from the document outlines the goals:

In providing a system for manipulating this sort of information, the hope would be to allow a pool of information to develop which could grow and evolve with the organisation and the projects it describes. For this to be possible, the method of storage must not place its own restraints on the information. This is why a "web" of notes with links (like references) between them is far more useful than a fixed hierarchical system. When describing a complex system, many people resort to diagrams with circles and arrows. Circles and arrows leave one free to describe the interrelationships between things in a way that tables, for example, do not. The system we need is like a diagram of circles and arrows, where circles and arrows can stand for anything.

In a page he wrote for kids, Tim gives a little more background on his motivation:

I found it frustrating that in those days, there was different information on different computers, but you had to log on to different computers to get at it. Also, sometimes you had to learn a different program on each computer. So finding out how things worked was really difficult. Often it was just easier to go and ask people when they were having coffee. Because people at CERN came from universities all over the world, they brought with them all types of computers. Not just Unix, Mac and PC: there were all kinds of big mainframe computer and medium sized computers running all sorts of software.

I actually wrote some programs to take information from one system and convert it so it could be inserted into another system. More than once. And when you are a programmer, and you solve one problem and then you solve one that's very similar, you often think, "Isn't there a better way? Can't we just fix this problem for good?" That became "Can't we convert every information system so that it looks like part of some imaginary information system which everyone can read?" And that became the WWW.

Open Letter

More recently, Tim has been raising the alarm about threats to the open web. Just last week he published an open letter Thirty Years on What's Next #fortheweb. Here's a brief extract, but it is worth reading the whole thing:

To tackle any problem, we must clearly outline and understand it. I broadly see three sources of dysfunction affecting today’s web:

1. Deliberate, malicious intent, such as state-sponsored hacking and attacks, criminal behaviour, and online harassment.
2. System design that creates perverse incentives where user value is sacrificed, such as ad-based revenue models that commercially reward clickbait and the viral spread of misinformation.
3. Unintended negative consequences of benevolent design, such as the outraged and polarised tone and quality of online discourse.

While the first category is impossible to eradicate completely, we can create both laws and code to minimize this behaviour, just as we have always done offline. The second category requires us to redesign systems in a way that change incentives. And the final category calls for research to understand existing systems and model possible new ones or tweak those we already have.

Turing Award

Tim, since 2004 Sir Tim Berners-Lee, was the 2017 Turing Award recipient for "inventing the World Wide Web, the first web browser, and the fundamental protocols and algorithms allowing the Web to scale." As it happens, I covered the Turing Award in 2016, to Diffie and Hellman, in my post Turing Award; Google's First Crash. And I covered 2018 in Hennessy and Patterson Receive the 2018 Turing Award. But for some reason, I didn't cover the 2017 award. This post will have to serve as belated coverage.

By the way, "www" is an odd abbreviation, having three times as many syllables as the thing it is abbreviating, "world wide web."

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