Information Management: A Proposal Alive
Information Management: A Proposal
KindPaper
Published1989
StatusAlive
AuthorsTim Berners-Lee
FieldHypertext
Sourcewww.w3.org ↗
The CERN memo that proposed the web — a distributed hypertext for tracking institutional knowledge. His boss marked it 'vague but exciting' and let him build it.
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Created by Tim Berners-Lee
Berners-Lee's March 1989 proposal addressed CERN's real problem — institutional knowledge trapped in incompatible systems — with a hypertext solution: linked documents over TCP, decentralized so anyone could add nodes. Mike Sendall wrote 'vague but exciting' on it and approved the NeXT cube it ran on.
By Christmas 1990 he had HTTP, HTML, the first browser/editor, and the first server at info.cern.ch — released free in 1993. The memo's insistence on decentralization and no central registry is why the web scaled where every managed hypertext system failed.