Happy birthday to the World Wide Web, born on this day in 1991 with absolutely no attention.
It was instead just a post in the alt.hypertext newsgroup.
Neither he nor the 200 other nerds who read it thought it was going to launch a new era of communication and commerce.(1) Tim Berners-Lee just wanted a better way for physicists to share information without needing the same hardware and software. He was on a NeXT computer, for example, and Steve Jobs smartly marketed to schools and government, where budget did not matter, but few in the private sector used his machine, or its NeXTStep operating system.
To bridge those hardware and software chasms, he proposed what he called HyperText. You still see it now as HTTP:// in your web browser.
HyperText is a way to link and access information of various kinds as a web of nodes in which the user can browse at will. Potentially, HyperText provides a single user-interface to many large classes of stored information such as reports, notes, data-bases, computer documentation and on-line systems help. We propose the implementation of a simple scheme to incorporate several different servers of machine-stored information already available at CERN, including an analysis of the requirements for information access needs by experiments.
By 1992 he had had enough done he posted the first image in the history of the World Wide Web - of French parody rock group Les Horribles Cernettes.
Being free was certainly important to its success but he was being paid by government, as was the high maintenance bill on his equipment, so he deserves thanks but so do the taxpayers from Germany, France, Italy, and the United Kingdom who wrote the checks for CERN.
NOTE:
(1) Though you can't blame him for spam messages. Those began in in 1978 when Gary Thuerk, a marketing guy for Digital Equipment Corporation, annoyed 400 of the 2600 people on ARPAnet with an ALL CAPS message promoting a DEC seminar.
