Birthplace of the World Wide Web - Computerphile

Key Takeaways

Hey there everyone. I'm at CERN in Geneva. Now CERN's famous for like the large hadron collider and all that physics, but it's also famous for something else which I'm sure a lot of you are thinking of. And just in there is a really cool sort of piece of history. Come and follow me and I'll show you and probably. Here we go. Where the web was born. So basically this corridor is where the worldwide web was developed. Show them the corridor. Pretty cool. Let me summarize this cuz it's quite detailed. Basically it says around 1990 and a couple of other buildings Tim Bernersley among the others came up with the ideas and then in ' 91 it was all pretty much consolidated to this corridor. So look at these guys. They're desecrating a sacred site. Basically, this corridor is still used. It's still a working place for CERN. This isn't a museum or anything. You look in all these offices off to the sides. People are just doing their work. But it was here from 91 onwards that Tim Berners Lee and his team developed the worldwide web here at CERN, all to do with accessing documents and things like that. We all know what it's become since. And it was around 94 that these people basically broke off from CERN and developed the web proper. But it all started here. Pretty cool, eh? And those are the actual pipes that the internet travels down. So if I turn this here, that will turn the internet off. I better not touch that. You can just submit your job from your office and it can end up on a computer that's completely at the other end of the world and then comes back to you with a result and all this demand that exists at different points of the world at different times of day is then equalized so that this whole structure is used efficiently. So this is like the most advanced organization on earth where the worldwide web was invented and that's the telephone.