© Christina Morillo/Pexels
Imagine a world without web browsers, internet pages, social media, or sites that you could visit with a single click. That was our reality just thirty years ago. In the twilight of the 1980s, when computing was still siloed in disparate networks and computers were still struggling to communicate with each other, a British physicist at CERN was preparing to radically transform it.
Tim Berners-Lee, born in post-war London in 1955, would lay the foundations of a revolutionary digital architecture: the World Wide Web, a gigantic virtual web that would weave the entire world.
Tim Berners Lee, photo prize in 2010. © Flickr/Wikipedia
A visionary genesis at the heart of European research
On March 13, 1989, in the corridors of CERN (European Council for Nuclear Research) in Geneva, Berners-Lee placed on the desk of his superior Mike Sendall a document soberly entitled Information Management: A Proposal. This proposal, annotated with a laconic ” vague but promising ” by Sendall, responded to a concrete problem: how to enable researchers from the world's largest physics laboratory, from dozens of different nationalities, to share their discoveries and data effectively ? The World Wide Web project, so named in 1990, was about to begin.
Berners-Lee's solution was based on a brilliant intuition: merging the concept of hypertext, which allowed people to navigate between documents by links, with existing Internet protocols. Hypertext, already used locally on some computers, made it possible to create connections between different parts of a document, much like footnotes in a book that link to other sections.
The Internet, for its part, already provided the technical infrastructure sufficient to connect computers around the world using the Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP). By combining these two technologies, Berners-Lee created a system where links could now point to documents located on any computer connected to the network, anywhere in the world. This seemingly simple synthesis of two distinct technologies would lead to a revolution comparable to the invention of the printing press in 1450 by Johannes Gutenberg.
The three innovations that changed our world
Working closely with Belgian engineer Robert Cailliau, Berners-Lee set about realizing his vision by developing the three technological pillars that still structure the modern Web today. Let's take a simple analogy: imagine the Web as a huge digital postal system. The URL (Uniform Resource Locator) acts as a postal address: each web page has its own unique address, allowing it to be located precisely (like https://www.presse-citron.net/, for example).
The Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) works like the rules of the post office: it defines how information should travel between computers. Finally, HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) is comparable to a standardized letter format: it determines how web pages must be structured to be understood by all browsers.
200% Deposit Bonus up to €3,000 180% First Deposit Bonus up to $20,000On his NeXT computer, he also designs the first web browser, named WorldWideWeb (see below), thus demonstrating the feasibility of its concept. Moreover, if you want to try it, CERN employees have reproduced it, and it is possible to try it via this link. This technological triad, designed with a logic of universality, laid the foundations of a global communication system, transcending any notion of digital frontiers.
The very first interface of the WorldWideWeb browser. © Screenshot/World Wide Web
A technological revolution at the service of humanity
The greatness of Berners -Lee also resides in his deeply humanist vision. In 1994, as the Web began to develop and the first companies glimpsed its commercial potential, he made a choice decisive: instead of patenting his invention to profit from it, he makes it freely accessible.
This decision, which could have brought him billions, reflects his deep conviction that the Web must remain an open and collaborative space. To ensure its evolution, he created the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), an organization that establishes the technical standards of the Web and ensures that it is universal.
This philosophy of openness quickly bore fruit. In a few years, the Web experienced exponential growth: from a few thousand sites in 1994, it grew to several million by the end of the 1990s. Developers around the world, free to innovate without licensing constraints, created new tools and applications. The appearance of the first general public browsers such as Mosaic, then Netscape, made the Web accessible to non-computer scientists.
Today, as we browse billions of websites every day, send emails, shop online, and videoconference, we still rely on the foundational technologies Berners-Lee designed. His invention transformed the Internet from a complex tool reserved for scientists into a universal platform, forever changing the way we communicate, learn, and work.
Berner-Lee is more than just a scientist: he is now considered a visionary who understood that technology should serve human progress. In 2009, he created the World Wide Web Foundation to promote universal access to the Internet. Faced with the excesses he observed, he did not hesitate to take a public stand. In 2018, in an open letter marking the 35th anniversary of the Web, he denounced the concentration of power in the hands of a few digital giants and called for stricter regulation. His Solid project, developed at MIT, proposes a new architecture for the Web where each user retains total control of their personal data. A way of returning to the fundamentals of a network designed to serve humanity rather than private interests. History will record that this British computer scientist not only invented the Web: he continues to work tirelessly to ensure that his creation remains true to its initial promise of emancipation and knowledge sharing. Thank you Mr. Berners-Lee!
- Tim Berners-Lee created the World Wide Web by merging hypertext and Internet protocols, laying the foundation for a global digital revolution.
- Its three technological pillars—URL, HTTP, and HTML—still structure the modern Web and have enabled universal communication without borders.
- A visionary and humanitarian, he made the Web freely accessible, enabling its exponential growth and continuing to advocate for an open and ethical Internet.
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