The Inventor of the World Wide Web

Every once an a while an invention comes along that seems to change the world. Such were the automobile, the printing press, television, and even the heat pump, but none of them changed the world as fast as the World Wide Web. It was born just 15 years ago today, by one measurement, yet the Web has managed to affect everything from international commerce to personal relations, from how revolutions begin to how you look up a recipe for corn muffins.

The Internet, that limitless sea of computers whisking files between one another in the blink of an eye, had been in existence in at least rudimentary form since the late 1950s. For a long time it was used mainly by experts in government or at university think tanks. Even in 1990 most people still hadn’t even heard of it, much less figured out how to use it.

Ten years earlier, in 1980, Tim Berners-Lee, a shaggy-haired 25-year-old computer consultant, was doing a six-month stint at CERN, the particle-physics lab in Geneva, and there he began the work that would later coalesce in the birth of the Web. He had grown up in 1960s London, the son of two brilliant mathematicians who made high-level math a game at the breakfast table and encouraged their son to fashion toy computers out of cardboard boxes.

He wanted to better organize the files on his computer and was fascinated with programs that he felt could work in a “brain-like way.” But though the elegance of the brain’s ability to organize information impressed him, he was also well aware of its limits—its tendency to forget and to get distracted and disorganized. He wanted a program that could, as he later put it, “keep track of all the random associations one comes across in real life and brains are supposed to be so good at remembering but sometimes mine wouldn’t.” He first devised a program that would allow him to link related documents on his hard drive. He called this initial program Enquire, short for Enquire Within Upon Everything, the title of a Victorian encyclopedia that offered tips on matters from how to make wax flowers to how to draw up a will.

But he wasn’t satisfied as long as his invention benefited only him. What if he could link up thousands of other computers, or even millions? What if he could take a vast jumble of information floating around in countless different places and make it clearly accessible to everyone?

Over the next decade he worked out the system that would change how we communicate and conduct business. First he wrote the easy-to-use code called HTML (HyperText Markup Language), which makes possible the highlighted links that you click on. HTML still functions as the lingua franca of the Web. He then figured out a way to give each Web site a static address, or URL (Uniform Resource Locator), and put together a set of rules for how documents could be linked. After that he created the first Web browser, which allowed users anywhere to view his creations from their own computers. Once people got the hang of all this, they could easily design Web sites that would be intuitive, interactive portals to vast arrays of information. On November 12, 1990, he formally proposed his project in a memo to his employers at CERN. Implementation went forward the next day.

By the time he introduced the Web to the public, personal computers had become very popular, so it was easy for people to join it. Within five years, the Web had 40 million users. In 2004 Computer Industry Almanac estimated that 1.07 billion people used it regularly. Seventy-five percent of homes in America have Internet access. “In just a handful of years, online access has managed to gain the type of traction that took other media decades to achieve,” says Kenneth Cassar, director of strategic analysis at Nielsen Media Research, the ratings company.

Berners-Lee was driven by a free-spirited curiosity and desire to make information accessible to everyone, and he has remained devoted to using the Web to keep the Internet, which was once only a tool of the elite, open to the masses. He saw it as a way to shatter the limits of knowledge by breaking open access to information. “The vision I have for the Web is about anything being potentially connected with anything,” he wrote in his book, Weaving the Web. “It is a vision that provides us with new freedom, and allows us to grow faster than we ever could when we were fettered by the hierarchical classification system into which we bound ourselves.”

While the inventors of Netscape and Google and other businesses have amassed millions, Berners-Lee has not capitalized on the Web’s moneymaking potential. Instead he has stood by the principles of open access and the democratizing possibilities of his invention. He holds an academic position at MIT and runs the World Wide Web Consortium, a nonprofit working group dedicated to keeping the Web free and uninhibited.

The Consortium, also know as W3, is currently working on a variety of accessibility issues, including an initiative to provide Internet access in developing countries. It also develops standards and protocols to govern the use of the Web so that it remains accessible and nonproprietary. The Consortium’s Web site (www.w3.org) states that “W3C is a forum for information, commerce, communication, and collective understanding.” Its vision is global, democratic, and has a whiff of utopianism.

The effect of the Web’s mass proliferation is impossible to gauge. Not since Gutenberg’s printing press has our ability to disseminate ideas and information been so profoundly altered. Fortunately the Web has, true to Berners-Lee’s vision, remained virtually boundless and unfettered. Anyone with access to a public library, an Internet café, or even just their own P.C. can use it to “enquire within upon everything.”

—Elizabeth D. Hoover is a former editor at American Heritage magazine.