WWW: Denominator for you, me and 1,463,632,359 other people

On December 25, 1990 Tim Berners-Lee established the first successful communication between an HTTP client and server via the Internet with the help of Robert Cailliau and a young student staff at CERN which have led to the world wide web. It is a common misconseption that they have invented the internet.

Well, they did not (see Vint Cerf and Robert Kahn).

The internet and all tools they needed to initially create the idea was already there.

The missing piece (or habitat actually) was the absence of a denominator for people to meet. Berners-Lee describes the inefficiency of information transfer while working at CERN as"it was just easier to go and ask people when they were having coffee".

"Well, 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."

World's first server

What he basically did was, accumulating the info he had with years of experience, observed and analysed the situation, thought about a more convenient way to use a variety of tools and here you go you just connected HTTP, IP, DNS, TCP/IP and ended up creating something 1,463,632,361 people use: WorldWideWeb.

"I want you to know that you too can make new programs which create new fun ways of using computers and using the Internet.

I want you to realize that, if you can imagine a computer doing something, you can program a computer to do that.

Unbounded opportunity... limited only by your imagination.

And a couple of laws of physics.

Of course, what happens with computers is that you have a basic simple idea and then you have to add things on to it for practical reasons. So real-world computer programs can end up with a lot of stuff in them. If they are good, they are still simple inside."

It actually is simple if you are proficient with the tools you use as they were parts of your body. The important part is getting there, which requires years of patience, resilience and devotion.