last byte

P H O T O G R A P H B Y A L E X A N D E R B E R G

was well established back then, it was politically inappropriate to use Internet protocols in Europe, because Europe was trying to stick to ISO protocols. There were a few people who used the Internet anyway, like Ben Segal, who was one of my mentors at CERN and suggested it would be a good way to go, even though it wasn’t officially the way to go.

 

Your manager at CERN, Mike Sendall, also took what seems, in retrospect, like an amazing institutional leap of faith in allowing you to build the World Wide Web.

Mike didn’t have an official excuse
for creating a global hypertext system,
(graphical user interfaces). It was very
exciting, and my parents and their col-
leagues were full of immense challenge
and opportunity.

And then, in 1989, you invented the
World Wide Web. What stands out for
you now about that time?

A few things are worth picking out. For instance, even though the Internet

BUILDING A DECENTRALIZED platform like the World Wide Web is, in many ways, a crucial test of one’s ability to let go, but ACM A.M. Turing Award recipient Sir Tim Berners-Lee is proud of the explosive creativity his invention has fostered. However, that does not mean he is done refining his creation: now a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Oxford University, Berners-Lee is still passionately involved in the fight to keep the Web open and available to all, protect people’s personal data, and stop the spread of fake news.

Your parents were both programmers.

They were mathematicians, and they worked for Ferranti, which was Q&A

This Is for Everyone

Sir Tim Berners-Lee on the formative years of the World Wide Web, and the challenges it now faces.

DOI: 10.1145/3081058 Leah Hoffmann

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