Technology History | CERN, Meyrin — The Label on the First Web Server Said Do Not Power It Down

Someone taped a note to the side of a black cube in red ink: "This machine is a server. DO NOT POWER IT DOWN!!" The cube was a NeXT, the machine Steve Jobs's post-Apple company sold to universities, and it sat on Tim Berners-Lee's desk at CERN running the first web server and the first browser, which was also an editor and was called WorldWideWeb. CERN's own history commits only to saying the server and site were working by the end of 1990. The 20 December date that circulates is a convention rather than a documented switch-on, and this collection prefers the honest vagueness. The proposal came first, in March 1989, under the title "Information Management: A Proposal". Berners-Lee's supervisor Mike Sendall wrote three words on the cover in his own hand, "Vague, but exciting", and let him get on with it. What he invented was the web, not the internet. The internet was already twenty years old by then, a network of networks moving packets; the web is an information system that runs over it, made of addresses, a transfer protocol and a markup language. The public announcement was a Usenet post to alt.hypertext on 6 August 1991, inviting anyone interested to collaborate. Then came the decision that mattered as much as the invention. On 30 April 1993 CERN signed a three-page declaration putting the WorldWideWeb software into the public domain, royalty-free, for anyone to use and build on. Weigh that against the counterfactual for a moment. A licensing regime on the web's basic protocols in 1993 would have produced a very different decade, and the document that prevented it runs to three pages. The laboratory is a fenced research campus and Berners-Lee's old office in Building 31 is not somewhere you can wander to; a corridor plaque marks it for people who work there. What is open to visitors is the Globe of Science and Innovation on the Esplanade des Particules, the wooden dome across the road from the main entrance, and the exhibitions around it. Use that address rather than the older Route de Meyrin one, which lands you a couple of hundred metres away at reception. Cover: photo by Coolcaesar, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons, showing the NeXT on display at CERN with the handwritten label still attached and a printout of the 1989 proposal beside it.