The Invention Given Away for Free — The Day the Web Opened the World

The internet we have followed through the earlier chapters was still a somewhat forbidding space, the preserve of engineers and researchers. What transformed it into a place anyone in the world could use was the Web, the World Wide Web. And the most beautiful, most consequential scene in the history of this invention is not the technology itself. It was one research institution’s decision to give it away for free.

One Scientist’s Small Frustration

The story begins at CERN, the vast research laboratory in Switzerland. Some seventeen thousand scientists gather there from around the world, each arriving from a university in a different country. The enormous body of information they handled was scattered piecemeal across computers here and there, and finding the document you were after was a real ordeal. Frustrated by this inefficiency, one British scientist submitted a proposal to his supervisor in March 1989. Its title: ‘Information Management: A Proposal.’ That was the starting point of the World Wide Web.

The core of Tim Berners-Lee’s idea lay in ‘marrying’ two existing technologies. One was hypertext, which links documents to one another. The other was the internet, which had grown up over the earlier chapters. By the end of 1990 he had built, himself, every tool that was needed: the URL, which points to a document’s location; HTML, the language for describing documents; and HTTP, the set of rules for carrying data. The world’s first web server and browser began running on the NeXT computer in his office. On that machine, a note was taped in handwritten red ink: ‘This is a server. Do NOT power it down!!’

‘Free’ — The Decision That Changed the World

If one had to choose the decisive day in the history of the web, it would not be the day the technology was completed. It would be 30 April 1993.

On that day, CERN made a momentous announcement. It would release the technology of the World Wide Web to everyone, free of charge and with no usage fee whatsoever — placing the source code, in effect, in the public domain. With this, anyone in the world could build web servers and browsers, and extend their features, freely and without permission or payment.

The weight of that decision stands out when set beside a contrasting event. Gopher, a rival information system then competing with the web in popularity, had shortly before announced that it would begin collecting usage fees. In that moment, developers turned away from Gopher and came pouring into the free web. Had CERN fenced its invention off in the same way, the web would have eked out a meagre existence as one company’s product, and the ‘web open to all the world’ that we know would never have come into being. Precisely because they let it go for free, the web became a public good.

Ease of Use Threw the Door Open

Free release prepared the soil; then a detonator was added. In 1993, Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina, at the NCSA at the University of Illinois, put out a browser called Mosaic.

What made Mosaic revolutionary? It could display images arranged within the same page as the text. Until then the web had been all letters, a bare and specialist thing. But Mosaic showed everyone, through intuitive operation, a screen where pictures and prose mingled. Here, for the first time, was an internet that ordinary people with no technical knowledge found ‘interesting.’ Historians place the 1993 arrival of Mosaic as the decisive turning point for the web.

The following year, 1994, Andreessen and others founded Netscape and, with the browser Navigator, went on to sweep the market. The web, once a scholar’s tool, was thus set loose as a medium for the general public. Here it is worth confirming one point that is easily muddled. The internet and the web are not the same thing. The internet is the communications infrastructure itself — the network of networks — while the web is merely one application that runs upon it. But because this ‘one application’ was so extraordinarily easy to use, for many people the web became synonymous with the internet itself.

The web, opened to the world for free, could not, however, remain in that ideal state. Onto this new continent where anyone could take part freely, vast sums of capital came flooding in — investors dreaming of a fortune overnight, companies whose share prices leapt merely by appending ‘.com’ to their names. The story continues into a war over browsers, and one of the most feverish speculative manias in history: the dot-com bubble.