How the World Got Wired
Chapter 6 — The Web, Given Away
On the border between France and Switzerland, buried about 100 meters below a quiet rural countryside, there is a circular tunnel almost 27 kilometers around. Inside the tunnel are some of the largest scientific instruments humans have ever built — enormous magnets, particle detectors the size of cathedrals, refrigeration systems colder than outer space. The instruments are used to smash tiny pieces of matter together at almost the speed of light, so that scientists can see what’s inside them.
The place is called CERN — the European Organization for Nuclear Research — and it is one of the most famous physics laboratories in the world. Thousands of scientists from dozens of countries come to CERN every year to work on its experiments. Many of the deepest discoveries about how the universe works have been made there.
CERN was also, by accident, the place where someone invented the World Wide Web.
The someone was a young English engineer named Tim Berners-Lee.
He did it as a side project.
His boss did not really approve.
The Internet Is Not the Web
Before I tell you how he did it, I need to clear up something that confuses almost everybody.
The internet and the World Wide Web are not the same thing.
The internet is what you read about in the last chapter — the global network of computers, all able to talk to each other through TCP/IP. It is a kind of road system. It can carry many different kinds of vehicles. Email is one kind of vehicle. Video calls are another. Online games are another. The web is just one more kind of vehicle that travels on the same roads. A very famous one — so famous that most people now use the word internet when they really mean web — but technically, the web is not the road. The web is one of the things that drives on it.
The internet had been around for about twenty years before anybody invented the web. It was used for email, for sharing files, for logging into distant computers, and for chatting in early discussion groups. It was used mostly by scientists and engineers, who knew the special commands you had to type to make it do anything.
The web is what made the internet usable by ordinary people. It is what your grandmother is using when she opens Facebook. It is what you are using when you type something into Google, or read a Wikipedia page, or watch a video on YouTube. Every website you have ever visited is part of the web. The web sits on top of the internet, the way a city sits on top of its roads.
It was invented in 1989, by one person, in a place dedicated to studying things much smaller than atoms.
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