Nobody was
paying attention to Tim Berners-Lee and his pet idea. He was a young
British scientist at CERN, a high-energy physics lab in Geneva, and he
had a radical new way for scientists to share data by linking documents
to one another over the Internet. He had kicked around a few different
names for it, including the "Infomesh" and the "Information Mine." But
he wasn't getting much interest from his bosses. His proposal came back
with the words "vague but exciting" written across the cover.
So
Berners-Lee took his invention to the people. He posted a message to a
newsgroup—a kind of electronic public-access bulletin
board—announcing the existence of the "WorldWideWeb (WWW) project."
The message included instructions on how to download the very first Web
browser from the very first website, http://info.cern.ch. Berners-Lee's
computer faithfully logged the exact second the site was launched:
2:56:20 p.m., Aug. 6, 1991.
He posted it, and we came. From that day
forward traffic to info.cern.ch rose exponentially, from 10 hits a day
to 100 to 1,000 and beyond. Berners-Lee had no idea that he had fired
the first shot in a revolution that would bring us home pages, search
engines, Beanie Baby auctions and the dotcom bust, but he knew that
something special had happened. "Of all the browsers people wrote,"
Berners-Lee remembers, "and all the servers they put up, very few of
them were done because a manager asked for them. They were done because
somebody read one of these newsgroup messages and got that twinkle in
their eye."
TIME Cover
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