Almost precisely 17 years ago, a young British researcher from Cern, the European organization for nuclear research, gave a presentation in Texas on a technology that was to change society dramatically. That same month, the Cern newsletter announced it to the world: It was called the World Wide Web.
It could easily have gone differently. Fifteen years ago, the management of the CERN physics lab in Geneva could have decided that this World Wide Web thing that researcher Tim Berners-Lee was working on might have some proprietary value down the road and put it under lock, key and license. But they didn’t. Fifteen years ago today, they put it into the public domain and changed history. Of the many Web milestones we celebrate, that makes this one special.
The inventor of LSD, Albert Hofmann, has joined the great Peter Max painting in the sky, but the dreams he spawned live on. Publisher and sometime savant Tim O’Reilly tells the BBC, on the occasion of the 15th anniversary of the open-sourcing of the World Wide Web, that a true “global consciousness” is at last emerging, thanks to the Net. “It really is going to happen,” he says, and “it’s going to happen mediated by computers.” It is, he continues, “the most profound change since the advent of literacy.” Might I just point out here that both LSD and the Web were invented in Switzerland?
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