Anyone with an interest in cyberspace has by now heard of the World Wide Web, the easy-to-use, graphically oriented computer network that features a powerful system for linking related subjects - and is now the most heavily used part of the global Internet. But surprisingly few have heard of the Web's inventor, Tim Berners-Lee.
Working at the European Particle Physics Lab, or CERN, near Geneva, Berners-Lee was aiming merely to develop a means of organising his own projects. In 1980, he wrote a piece of software that acted as a kind of super-calendar and address book and ideas index, all cross-referenced so that he could find things easily.
'But in 1989, I wanted anybody else in my project to use it,' says Berners-Lee, 'and I wanted others elsewhere to use it and other people's projects to be documented in the same way.
'I couldn't persuade anybody to pick it up. I looked at all the products out there, and in some cases tried to persuade people to take one that had possibilities of working like this, and to make it work - and they said "No" ...
'Eventually there were two people at CERN who helped. Robert Cailliau was enthusiastic and helped promote the idea. And Mike Sandall, my boss, agreed it would be a good idea. "Why not? Let's do it," he said, though he had no mandate and no funding for it.
'I put the code [for free] on the Internet for colleagues to use, and a few people picked it up and started to use it in '91.
'So it started very slowly. One didn't hear much about the World Wide Web that arose from this until '93.
'The Web had only 100 sites in 1992 - and yet more than 22,000 at the last count.
'As for the Web's future. Let's look out for:
- It being as easy to edit hypertext links as to make them.
- All online services providing you not only with a link but with disk space on a server for your own public information.
- The Web being used to help us analyse our future problems, and doing this by expressing connections, dependencies and relationships.'
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