2. 1. What is CERN?
2. Where was the web born?
3. Why?
4. How?
5.
6.
7.
8. Open Standards
3. CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, is one
of the world’s largest and most respected centres for scientific
research. Its business is fundamental physics, finding out what
the Universe is made of and how it works. At CERN, the world’s
largest and most complex scientific instruments are used to
study the basic constituents of matter — the fundamental
particles. By studying what happens when these particles
collide, physicists learn about the laws of Nature.
Founded in 1954, the CERN Laboratory sits astride the Franco–
Swiss border near Geneva. It was one of Europe’s first joint
ventures and now has 20 Member States.
What is CERN?
4. Where the web was born
Tim Berners-Lee, a scientist at CERN, invented
the World Wide Web (WWW) in 1989.
The first proposal for the World Wide Web
(WWW) was made at CERN by Tim Berners-
Lee in 1989, and further refined by him and
Robert Cailliau in 1990.
5. Why?
The Web was originally conceived and developed to meet the
demand for automatic information sharing between scientists
working in different universities and institutes all over the world.
The basic idea of the WWW was to merge the technologies of
personal computers, computer networking and hypertext into a
powerful and easy to use global information system.
6. How?
The first web servers were all located in
European physics laboratories and only a few
users had access to the NeXT platform on
which the first browser ran.
CERN soon provided a much simpler browser,
which could be run on any system.
7. The first web server in the United States came on-line in
December 1991, once again in a pure research institute:
the Stanford Linear Accelerator Centre (SLAC) in
California.
At this stage there was only two kinds of browser.
One was the original development version, very
sophisticated but only available on the NeXT machines.
The other was the ‘line-mode’ browser, which was easy to
install and run on any platform but limited in power and
user-friendliness.
It was clear that the small team at CERN could not do all
the work needed to develop the system further, so TBL
launched a plea via the Internet for other developers to join
in.
8. Early in 1993, the National Center for
Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the
University of Illinois released a first version of
their Mosaic browser.
This software ran in the X Window System
environment, popular in the research
community, and offered friendly window-based
interaction.
Shortly afterwards the NCSA released versions
also for the PC and Macintosh environments.
The existence of reliable user-friendly browsers
on these popular computers had an immediate
impact on the spread of the WWW.
9. The European Commission approved its first
web project (WISE) at the end of the same
year, with CERN as one of the partners.
By late 1993 there were over 500 known web
servers, and the WWW accounted for 1% of
Internet traffic!
By the end of 1994, the Web had 10,000
servers, of which 2,000 were commercial, and
10 million users.
10. Open Standards
An essential point was that the Web should
remain an open standard for all to use and that
no-one should lock it up into a proprietary
system.
In this spirit, CERN submitted a proposal to the
Commission of the European Union under the
ESPRIT programme: ‘WebCore’. The goal of
the project was an International Consortium.
In January 1995, the International World Wide
Web Consortium (W3C) was founded.
11. Sources
● CERN (2008) CERN in a nutshell. Available at:
http://public.web.cern.ch/public/en/About/About-en.html (Accessed: 10 October 2012).
● CERN (2008) Where was the web born. Available at:
http://public.web.cern.ch/public/en/About/Web-en.html (Accessed: 10 October 2012).
● CERN (2008) How the web began. Available at:
http://public.web.cern.ch/public/en/About/WebStory-en.html (Accessed: 10 October 2012).
● CERN Logo Available at:
http://www.attendconference.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/cern_logo.jpg (Accessed: 10
October 2012).
