12. March 1989
37 years ago
A single memo marked "vague, but exciting" became the web that binds the modern world together.
By the late 1980s, the CERN research centre in Switzerland was a tangle of computers that barely spoke to one another. Information sat scattered across incompatible systems, and finding a document often meant asking the right person. A British researcher, Tim Berners-Lee, found it needlessly cumbersome.
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On 12 March 1989 he submitted a memo titled "Information Management: A Proposal". His boss, Mike Sendall, scrawled one line across the top: "Vague, but exciting." That was green light enough.
The idea was simple but radical: link documents together with clickable links — hypertext — across machines. Berners-Lee invented three building blocks: the URL address, the HTTP protocol and the HTML language.
In 1990 he built the first browser, the first web server and the world's first web page. From a few linked pages grew a web of links that stretched across the entire globe.
Within a few decades the World Wide Web connected billions of people, devices and ideas. It began as a single memo no one quite understood — and became the very web that binds the modern world together.