Happy 10th birthday to the World Wide Web

NEWS Ten years ago today, on 6 August 1991, the initial sketches of a system designed to publish universal information on the internet went public, to a very mixed welcome. Two engineers at Switzerland's nuclear research laboratory Cern, Tim Berners-Lee and his colleague Robert Cailliau, had conceived of a hypertext system which would allow information in any language or form to be shared across the world. During 1991 they were preoccupied with selling the idea to their taskmasters at Cern, and it wasn't until the plans hit the alternative newsgroup, alt.hypertext, that the significance of the world wide web began to dawn. Cailliau told silicon.com today: "The internet crowd very much believed they were ruling the world on the net... They had very adamant and strange views on how it should be done." Many criticised Berners-Lee and Cailliau for inventing yet another mark-up language (something they hadn't in fact done), while others called for an independent browser to be developed to check their specifications were correct. "There were always people who were positive," Cailliau said. "It's thanks to them that it actually grew and became what we know today." In an interview with silicon.com last year, Tim Berners-Lee, now a professor at MIT and director of W3C, remembered the contribution early internet users made to the system. "It started off with me and my boss saying 'why not?', but basically no great encouragement and no budget from above. [Then] a lot of other people across the world, reading an email or looking at a newsgroup, saying: 'That could be really interesting I think I'll install one of these web servers before I go home," Berners-Lee said. "There was a great variety of people all operating independently, but driven by the same idea of changing the world. To look back on that is pretty neat." For Cailliau, the most lasting memory of 1991 is the struggle to convince people that the WWW could be successful. "It was very difficult to spread the word," he said. "You've got to have something in the other person's brain to hang your idea on - and people had no concept of a truly global system." For both Berners-Lee and Cailliau the struggle continues. "We are still not using computers for what we could be," said Cailliau. "I'm glad the internet took off, but I would have liked it to take off in another direction."