The Layers Of The Web

The opening presentation from the Beyond Tellerrand conference held in Berlin in November 2019.

Guten Morgen. All right. I’m just going to get started because I’ve got a lot to talk about and I’m very, very excited to be here.

I’m excited to talk about the web. I’ve been thinking a lot about the web. You know, I think a lot about the web all the time, but this year, in particular, thinking about where the web came from; asking myself where the web came from, which is kind of a dumb question because it’s pretty obvious where the web came from.

It came from this guy. This is Tim Berners-Lee and he is the creator of the World Wide Web. It was 30 years ago, March 1989, that he wrote a proposal while he was at CERN, a very dull-looking proposal called “Information Management: A Proposal” that had incomprehensible diagrams trying to explain what he had in mind. But a supervisor, Mike Sendall, saw the potential and scrawled across the top, “Vague but exciting.”

Tim Berners-Lee starts working on this idea he has for a global hypertext system and he starts creating the world’s first web browser and the world’s first web server, which is this NeXT machine which is in the Science Museum in London, a lovely machine, the NeXT box.