Where the Web was born

Taking a closer look at LHC

In 1989, Tim Berners-Lee, a young scientist working at CERN, created the  HYPERTEXT to allow better comunication among scientists who were working on different projects.

With the help of Robert Caillou and a small team he created the HTML, http, URLs, the first Server, the first browser and the first html editor.

More about this history in:

The birth of the Web | CERN

 
When the CERN decided allow the free distribution of the Web its progress was unstoppable.

From one  Server in the early 90´s it has surpassed 45 million today.

It's time for a new "Web": G R I D.


Berners-Lee used the NeXTcube at CERN as the world's first web server. This machine (which entered the market at the end of 1988) was based on the Motorola 68030, a 25 MHz, microprocessor which was the most powerful at the time.

Tomado de https://es.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archivo:First_Web_Server.jpg


An online survey conducted in 2007 by the CNN news group ranked the World Wide Web as the most wonderful of the seven modern wonders of the world.

The World Wide Web won with a whopping 50 per cent of the votes (3,665 votes). The runner up was CERN again, with 16 per cent of voters (1130 votes) casting the ballot in favour of the CERN particle accelerator LHC.

Stepping into place behind CERN and CERN is 'None of the Above' with 8 per cent of the votes (611 votes), followed by the development of Dubai (7%), the bionic arm (7%), China's Three Gorges Damn (5%), The Channel Tunnel (4%), and France's Millau viaduct (3%).

In a corridor of CERN Building 2, a plaque marks the exact place where Tim Berners Lee invented the web. It is actually a very modest acknowledgement to one of the most important achievements in modern history  
 

The text of the plaque is:

In the offices of this corridor, all the fundamental technologies of the World Wide Web were developed.

Started in 1990 from a proposal made by Tim Berners-Lee in 1989, the effort was first divided between an office in building 31 of the Computing and Networking Division (CN) and one in building 2 of the Electronics and Computing for Physics Division (ECP).

In 1991 the team came together in these offices, then belonging to ECP. It was composed of two CERN staff members, Tim Berners-Lee (GB) and Robert Cailliau (BE), aided by a number of Fellows, Technical Students, a Coop'erant and Summer Students.

At the end of 1994 Tim Berners-Lee left CERN to direct the WWW consortium (W3C), a world-wide organization devoted to leading the Web to its full potential. The W3C was founded with the help of CERN, the European Commission, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), the Institut National pour la Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique (INRIA), and the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA).

In 1995 Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau received the ACM Software System Award for the World Wide Web. In 2004, Tim Berners-Lee was awarded the first Millenium Technology Prize by the Finnish Technology Award Foundation.

The CERN Library

June 2004


For more information on how CERN contributes to society, please visit the following CERN website:

https://home.web.cern.ch/about/what-we-do/our-impact


http://lhcb.web.cern.ch/

AUTHORS


Xabier Cid Vidal, PhD in experimental Particle Physics for Santiago University (USC). Research Fellow in experimental Particle Physics at CERN from January 2013 to Decembre 2015. He was until 2022 linked to the Department of Particle Physics of the USC as a "Juan de La Cierva", "Ramon y Cajal" fellow (Spanish Postdoctoral Senior Grants), and Associate Professor. Since 2023 is Senior Lecturer in that Department.(ORCID).

Ramon Cid Manzano, until his retirement in 2020 was secondary school Physics Teacher at IES de SAR (Santiago - Spain), and part-time Lecturer (Profesor Asociado) in Faculty of Education at the University of Santiago (Spain). He has a Degree in Physics and in Chemistry, and he is PhD for Santiago University (USC) (ORCID).

CERN


CERN WEBSITE

CERN Directory

CERN Experimental Program

Theoretical physics (TH)

CERN Experimental Physics Department

CERN Scientific Committees

CERN Structure

CERN and the Environment

LHC


LHC

Detector CMS

Detector ATLAS

Detector ALICE

Detector LHCb

Detector TOTEM

Detector LHCf

Detector MoEDAL

Detector FASER

Detector SND@LHC

 


 IMPORTANT NOTICE

 For the bibliography used when writing this Section please go to the References Section


© Xabier Cid Vidal & Ramon Cid - rcid@lhc-closer.es  | SANTIAGO (SPAIN) |

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