The revolutionary algorithm ” “

The Web is 25. In the 1989 nobody started the day reading newspapers on-line, commenting friend’s pictures or surfing a weblog in order to get a solution for a problem. On the 12th March of that year, Tim Berners Lee, a computer scientist at CERN in Geneve, submitted to his supervisor a proposal to optimize information exchange between the departments, the laboratories and the research groups of the institute. On the original paper there was a “meagre algorithm” that, with the contribution of another computer scientist, Robert Cailliau, it would become the World Wide Web. In the recurrence of the invention Mr James Gillies, head of communication at CERN press office, eyewitness of web’s birth and coauthor with Mr Cailliau of the book “How the Web was born”, recalls these 25 years and looks to the future in an interview for Sir Europe. Which was the purpose CERN wanted to achieve with the World Wide Web? “The web was invented as an individual initiative by Tim Berners Lee, it was not an official CERN project, at least at first. Tim saw a need for a more simple way of sharing information between computing platforms on the internet for the increasingly large global community of scientists involved with CERN. His supervisor, Mike Sendall, wrote the famous words ‘vague, but exciting’, on the proposal, and allowed Tim to continue”. What has inspired the invention of the Web? “The time was right for Tim’s invention. At the end of the 80s, it was becoming common for people to have computers on their desks. The Internet was well established, and hypertext was also well developed. Tim saw the advantages to be had by putting them all together”. From 1989 to 2014: the Web is nowadays the network that CERN have imagined? “I think it is safe to say that the web has exceeded the expectations of anyone who was at CERN in 1989 – except perhaps Tim Berners Lee!” What do you think about the Web 2.0 and about the evolution of the Web provoked by weblogs and social network? “Web 2.0 has democratized information, and we’re still seeing the influence of that. Journalism is changing significantly as traditional and on-line media come together. Only last night, I was at an event to mark the launch of a new publication from the Wellcome Trust. Called Mosaic, it provides quality in-depth articles under a creative commons license, and many of them have been taken up by traditional media”. Which will be the future of Web in the next years? What point will we have reached by the end of the 21th century? “I think that the answer to this hinges on the success of Tim Berners Lee’s ‘the web we want’ initiative, which launches on 12 March to mark the 25th anniversary of his original paper”. Is the web an occasion of global union or global division caused by digital divide? “That very much depends on how people use it”. Is there a digital divide due to the age or, in other words, has the web provoked an intergenerational caesura? “Yes, I think there is a generational effect, but it’s not just the web, it is a wider societal phenomenon. Young people in the west, for example, tend to be much more comfortable with giving up their privacy than older generations of people for whom those civil liberties were hard won”. How would the world have been without the Web? Which technologies or research, for example among those developed by CERN, would never have appeared? “Without the web, we would have had similar technologies. The internet was well established, as was personal computing. What CERN did to make the web what it is today is give it royalty free to the world in 1993. This, coupled with the W3C’s efforts to maintain web standards means that we have one web, not several. Without CERN’s gesture in 1993, we would have many proprietary systems for sharing information on the Internet, and it would be a less democratic, more commercial space than it is today”.