17.3.2011

THE FIRST INNOVATION RECOGNISED BY THE MILLENNIUM TECHNOLOGY PRIZE HAS COME OF AGE

The World Wide Web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee's gift to humanity, is celebrating its 20th birthday. The innovation awarded the first-ever Millennium Technology Prize has changed the world beyond measure, but its best years are yet to come.

Automobiles, telephones, the World Wide Web - just some  of the technological advances that have transformed our daily lives in an irrevocable manner.

Only 20 years ago, in March 1991, the world's first web service was established - a telephone directory for CERN, the European Particle Physics Laboratory. Using the new web technology, researchers were able to use their own workstations to access the database of telephone numbers located on CERN's mainframe computer.

"Mundane as it was, this first presentation of the Web was, in a curious way, a killer application," says Berners-Lee in his book Weaving the Web.

New technology had already been tested on Christmas Day 1990. It was on that day that info.cern.ch, the world's first-ever web server, went live. Berners-Lee and his colleague Robert Cailliau communicated with the server over the Internet using their workstations. Berners-Lee's software and protocols were put to the test. Typing http://info.cern.ch into the browser, an HTTP request was submitted to the server via the Internet. An HTML document stored on the server opened in the browser window.

The world's first Web users browsing CERN's telephone directory had no idea that the technology they were using was revolutionary. Today, more than two billion people are able to access the World Wide Web. A global information playground offers opportunities to share experiences and knowledge, and allows others to share such access at any time and anywhere.

Birthday celebrations ahead of time

CERN, birthplace of the World Wide Web, actually celebrated its 20th anniversary on 13 March 2009. Exactly 20 years earlier in 1989, Berners-Lee, frustrated by the hierarchical CERNDOC documentation system, wrote a proposal for Mike Sendall, his boss. In this, Berners-Lee noted that the structure of CERN's organisation was a multiply-connected "web" whose interconnections evolved over time. He suggested that information should be organised in the same manner. "Vague, but exciting" was the comment Sendall wrote on the proposal, but the new idea received no other response.

One year later, working with Cailliau, Berners-Lee wrote a refined version of the hypertext project proposal. Sendall agreed that they could purchase a new NeXT computer to work on the project. Berners-Lee created the software code for the WWW in just three months, from October to December 1990.

The World Wide Web was not an overnight success. People working at CERN didn't seem to understand how it would be useful. Nowadays, the idea that a web link can connect to a document originating anywhere on the planet seems completely natural. In 1991, it was perhaps a little too revolutionary.

Once Berners-Lee and Cailliau had established that the Web technology worked, they started spreading the word. They flew around the world meeting people who were interested in hypertext, encouraging enthusiasts to set up their own servers. At the same time, they refined the basic elements of the Web with help of Nicola Pellow, an intern.

The first problem was that the Web software had been written with NeXT, a rare operating system. It was clear that the trio couldn't develop browser software for more-common platforms such as Macintosh, Unix and Windows all by themselves. Pellow wrote a generic line mode browser called WWW that could run on non-NeXT systems, but developing a graphical point-and-click browser was a much larger task.

The Finnish students' UNIX browser

One of their first trips as web evangelists now paid off. After Cailliau's visit to the Helsinki University of Technology, four Finnish students started work on a combined master's thesis project. In April 1992, their work bore fruit - Erwise, the world's first graphical browser software running on Unix machines was ready. It was so promising that Berners-Lee travelled to Finland to encourage the students to continue the project. As more lucrative projects beckoned, they didn't.

"I certainly couldn't continue with it; all the code was documented in Finnish," says Berners-Lee in his book.

Unpaid voluntary work did however continue around the world. Just one month later, the ViolaWWW browser written by Pei Wei, a student at the University of California, was launched.

Berners-Lee persuaded CERN's management to place the WWW technology in the public domain. Volunteers were attracted by the concept of a free web. In 1993, the University of Illinois published the NCSA Mosaic browser. Easy to use, it worked on the Mac, Unix and Windows platforms. Mosaic supported audio and video files, saved bookmarks and browsing histories. The free browser was downloaded from FTP servers at a record pace. The exponential growth of the World Wide Web had begun.

The man who changed the world

Google, Amazon, Facebook and thousands of internet millionaires have Berners-Lee to thank for their success. Our shopping habits, the way we listen to music and keep in touch with our friends has changed forever.

Berners-Lee's innovation has had an impact on politics, economics, and even on criminal practices. All computer users will be able to access a wide range of knowledge sources, previously a privilege for the favoured few.

Berners-Lee is now leading the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), an international community which develops standards to underwrite the Web's successful long-term growth. W3C is currently drafting HTML5, the next evolution of the HTML language which promises to make every Web user's life easier. Adding audio and video files to the Web will become as easy as inserting images, and no browser add-ons are needed to play them.

Threats to the Web

On its 20th birthday the Web is thoroughly integrated into our daily lives. But according to its creator, both the Web's freedom and its open nature, features that we tend to take for granted, are under threat. In December 2010, in Scientific American, Berners-Lee criticised social networking sites such as Facebook for limiting the web's openness.

"Some of the Web's most successful inhabitants have begun to chip away at its principles," he wrote.

Social networking sites such as Facebook and LinkedIn offer value by collecting information as users share their birthdays, contact information, likes and dislikes and other links.

"Once you enter your data into one of these services, you cannot easily use them on another site. Each site is a silo, walled off from the others", says Berners-Lee.

If this trend continues, the Web could be broken into separated, fragmented islands. Why should we be worried?

"Because the Web is yours," says Berners-Lee in his book, "It is a public resource on which you, your business, your community and your government depend. The Web is also vital to democracy, a communications channel that makes possible a continuous worldwide conversation. The Web is now more critical to free speech than any other medium."

Far from ready

As the father of the web gives his lecture in CERN at the WWW's 20-year anniversary, it becomes clear that he is a technology optimist - and still amazingly excited.

"The web is not all done; this is just the tip of the iceberg. New changes are going to rock the boat even more."

"Currently, the number of web pages is roughly equal to the number of neurons in the human brain. But, unlike the brain, we have designed the World Wide Web, and we can change it if it has problems. The World Wide Web has to serve humanity."

Text: Petja Partanen / Tarinatakomo

WWW - the first steps

Computer:
Code for the Web was written on NeXT computers supplied by Next, Inc, a company founded by Steve Jobs, who had earlier been involved in Apple Computer. Much of the current Mac OSX system is built on the NeXT operating system.

Programming language: C

First browser:
WorldWideWeb, working on the NeXT platform. Web pages could be both accessed and edited.

First web server:
nxoc01.cern.ch and its alias info.cern.ch

First demonstration:
Christmas Day 1990, the first users were Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau.

First web service:
CERN telephone directory

First web browsers:
WorldWideWeb, December 1990, NeXT platform, by Tim Berners-Lee
Erwise, April 1992, Unix platform, by students at the Helsinki University of Technology
Samba, summer 1992, for Macintosh, by Robert Cailliau and Nicola Pellow.

First Finnish web service:
www.funet.fi, a non-profit company providing IT resources for Finnish research institutes and academia. The server was started up soon after Berners-Lee attended a seminar at the University of Turku in the summer of 1992