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CincinnatiMan | 5 months ago

Did this man really invent the World Wide Web all on his own?

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odo1242|5 months ago

He wrote the very first version of HTTP, the very first version of HTML, and the very first web browser, and gave them away for free (public domain)

mwcz|5 months ago

Don't forget URL, the most important protocol of them all and the first one Tim had standardized.

wiether|5 months ago

Did this person even read the article before commenting?

> That’s why, in 1993, I convinced my Cern managers to donate the intellectual property of the world wide web, putting it into the public domain. We gave the web away to everyone.

zx8080|5 months ago

Is the whole idea of CERN a public serve through research and innovation? If so, there was no non-public way to use the http/html research results.

rexreed|5 months ago

Before I first used the Web in 1991, I was on Usenet and of course Telnet and email-based systems, and Gopher also emerged around the same time. So the web didn't come out of nowhere, but the IP behind what we're still using, HTML and HTTP, freed from CERN's IP clutches is a good thing. Interesting that it was freed in 1993, once the momentum of the Web was becoming clear.

Might something else have emerged instead if CERN had said no? Who knows. Without the Web, the Internet itself might have stayed in its primarily research and academic domain. The rapid growth of the Web is in part what motivated the commercialization of the Internet and the "Information Superhighway", and then came the entrepeneurs and VCs, and well, here we are.

Could it have all happened based on Gopher instead? Who knows.

s1110|5 months ago

May I ask you how did you use Telnet back then? Was it some text-based system like BBS you connected to?

yawpitch|5 months ago

Technically, yes. I mean it took a lot more than just TBL’s contribution to build up to what we have today — for good or ill — but the fundamental idea that is the WWW was his.

bena|5 months ago

The core idea is small enough.

And the http protocol sits on top of the stack. Routing, dns, nat, etc all do not matter to http.

HTTP is basically “this is how you send a document over the wire”.

Manfred|5 months ago

Insofar that’s possible in general. Networking, hyperlink systems, and phone books already existed.