Tim Berners-Lee was a thirty-five-years-old
physicist working at CERN, the European Particle Physics Laboratory in Geneva,
Switzerland, when his NeXT computer arrived in 1990 for a special project.
The result: The World Wide Web, what we
know today as the internet.
Berners-Lee asked the lab for about $50,000
in equipment and a few programmers to see if he could link together ideas and
computer and make the software accessible for free. Using the NeXT computer, he
put together a coding system called HTML, for Hyper Text Markup language, which
use tags that allow pages to be viewed correctly.
He gave each web page a unique address, or
URL, for Universal Resource Locator. He then created the rules that allowed the
information to be transferred and shared, called HTTP, or Hyper Text Transform
Protocol. And he produced the first browser to allow users to see the result
the same way.
All of this was done on a NeXT computer
that comes with the ready to use e-mail account and an audio welcome from Steve
Jobs, who said the computer wasn’t about personal computing, but about “
’Interpersonal’ computing.”
Berners-Lee said that the software that
came with the next machine made his programming work “remarkably easy.” He
started the work in October 1990, made it available in his lab in December, and
gave it to the world in summer of 1991. For the next couple of years, he
refined it. Within about five years, the Web had forty million users.
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