A 1989 CERN Proposal: The Simple Idea That Became the World Wide Web

The corridor outside the office was quiet, the kind of quiet that exists in large research institutions where brilliance happens behind closed doors. Inside, Tim Berners-Lee sat in front of a computer, staring at a problem that had nothing to do with physics equations. CERN was overflowing with  information. Research papers. Experiment logs. Technical notes. Internal memos. Thousands of documents. Stored on different machines. Using different formats. Created by people who constantly moved between projects. The problem was not lack of data. The problem was fragmentation. A Research Lab Drowning in Its Own Knowledge CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, hosted scientists from all over the world. Teams formed. Teams dissolved. People arrived. People left. With them went knowledge.…