In the last few weeks there has been coverage in the media of the 30th birthday of the World Wide Web, one of the most influential inventions of the twentieth century.  

The invention and deployment of the infrastructure to support the Web involved many people including some living in Berkshire and the Lambourn Valley.  This article has been contributed by Alistair Mills, who worked at CERN in Geneva for five years in the building where Sir Tim Berners-Lee invented the web.  

Here he tells the story …

Most people know that there is something called the World Wide Web, and something called the Internet, but what is the difference?  In short, the Web is a service, and the Internet is hardware.  Let me elaborate with an analogy.  Suppose you wish to establish a bus service from Lambourn to London.  That would not seem like a big project provided someone had already built the M4 and all the connecting roads.  In this analogy, the Web is the the bus service, and the Internet is the motorway.

Today, there are many services on the Internet.  The Web is the most used service, and email is next.  Many of the services which people use today, such as viewing films on television, are implemented using the Web.

Why did the web happen in Geneva in 1989?

The Web did not suddenly appear from nowhere.  It was built on work which had been going on for twenty years.  Here I identify three projects, one in the United States, one in France, and one in Europe; all three had a lot of influence on the invention of the Web.

In the United States, one of the government agencies is called the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency, DARPA.  DARPA has carried out many large projects for defence, but it has also delivered many projects in computing and some led to many of the products which we all use today, such as Windows and Networking.  In the 1970s, DARPA had the task of connecting computers together into networks so that data could be exchanged, and shared, to ensure continuity in the event of a national emergency.  What emerged from this work were products which we now call Networking.

In France in the 1970s, France Telecom decided that it could no longer afford to create and distribute telephone directories.  The number of telephone subscribers had increased, and the directories were very expensive to print and distribute.  Once they were distributed, they were quickly out of date.  The solution was to create a system called Minitel which provided a small screen and a keyboard which connected via a telephone line to a central system which contained the telephone directory.  The system also provided pages of information on many other subjects such as bus timetables, opening hours of leisure facilities and so on.  You could even view and pay your taxes.  This system had an appearance rather like Teletext in the UK.  However, the information which Minitel displayed to the user was personalised.  Teletext could not do this.  Many telecoms companies in many countries were interested in Minitel, then decided not to deploy it as it was too expensive.  The French government however paid for every telephone subscriber in France to have a Minitel at home.  The Minitel service was started in 1978 and continued until 2012.

Science is a subject which everyone studies at school and many people go on to study science or engineering at University.  Some scientific research can be carried out with modest resources, but much science today takes place in large laboratories employing thousands of people.  The CERN laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland is one of the biggest laboratories in Europe.  It is the home of the Large Hadron Collider, Europe’s largest scientific research project.  Although the experimental facilities are in Geneva, most of the research happens in universities all over Europe.  The scientific mission of the work is to study atomic particles in order to understand the universe.  However, there are other reasons for this work including bringing people together from all over Europe to work on a single project which is too big for any one country to afford.  Another reason is to challenge what is possible with present technology.  One of the areas in which CERN has been prominent is the use of Information Technology.

So, what happened?