A Proposal Sets Out the World Wide Web Project

A Revised Proposal at CERN

On November 12, 1990, Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau issued a proposal for a hypertext project at CERN. It developed a problem Berners-Lee had set out in an earlier memorandum in 1989: information useful to researchers was scattered across people, computers and systems that did not share one organization. The proposal suggested building a way to follow links between those pieces. It was neither the invention of the Internet nor the instant at which people everywhere began using the Web. It was a document that described an approach and sought support for making it work inside a particular research environment.

Linking Without Moving Everything Into One Store

A large laboratory brings together visitors and projects that change over time. A document may be important to a new group even though the person who wrote it has left, and related records can live on machines managed by different teams. Hypertext offered a way to point from one document to another without first rebuilding every source as part of a single directory. That possibility depended on a common way to identify resources and ask for them. The proposal's appeal was that it could join information across existing boundaries rather than insisting that each group abandon its tools before sharing anything.

The Internet Was Already There

Networks could move information between computers before the Web. The Web combined addressing, a transfer protocol and a way to describe linked documents so that people could use existing network connections to move among resources. Berners-Lee built an early browser and editor as well as a server, using a NeXT computer at CERN. The ability to follow a link became meaningful only when there was both something to request and a program able to request it. The proposed project therefore had to become running software and published information before anyone could judge whether it solved the problem raised in the memorandum.

From One Laboratory to Many Publishers

The Web began to spread outside CERN, and the institution made the underlying Web software available freely in 1993. That later decision and the arrival of other browsers helped users and publishers adopt the system. The November 1990 proposal matters because it gives the early project a specific goal against which those later developments can be read. Researchers were not trying to design every service now available through a browser. They were trying to keep connected information usable across a changing organization. A simple link that worked between separately managed computers turned out to address a problem shared by many more people than those who commissioned the prototype.