The Web's Birthday
Next: March 12, 2027
Vague, but exciting.
The story
Where it comes from
This Story marks the anniversary of the first proposal for the World Wide Web. In March 1989 Tim Berners-Lee, a British computer scientist at CERN, the physics laboratory near Geneva, gave his boss Mike Sendall a paper called 'Information Management: A Proposal'. It described a universal system of linked documents, so that scientists would stop losing information and could find each other's work. Sendall wrote 'Vague, but exciting' on it and let him carry on. The Web's birthday is usually kept on 12 March, although CERN's records give only the month.
How it's celebrated
There is no formal observance, but the proposal is easy to visit: CERN has published it online, Sendall's handwritten note included, and keeps the home of the first website at info.cern.ch. It is a good day to send a card online, follow a few links for fun, and remember that all of it began as a memo.
Did you know
- Berners-Lee wrote the first browser, called WorldWideWeb, on a NeXT computer, made by the company Steve Jobs founded after leaving Apple.
- Names debated for the project included 'The Mesh' and 'The Information Mine'.
- The proposal asked for a system in which 'generality and portability are more important than fancy graphics'.
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