Twenty years ago this month, something happened at CERN that would
change the world forever: Tim Berners-Lee handed a document to his
supervisor Mike Sendall entitled “Information Management : a Proposal”.
“Vague, but exciting” is how Mike described it, and he gave Tim the nod
to take his proposal forward. The following year, the World Wide Web was
born. This week, it’s a pleasure and an honour for us to welcome the
Web’s inventor back to CERN to mark this special anniversary at the
place the Web was born.
The celebration will take place in the Globe this Friday afternoon from
14:00 to 17:30. It will consist of short presentations from Web
veterans, a keynote speech from Tim Berners-Lee with a demonstration of
the original browser, and a series of presentations from people that Tim
believes are doing exciting things with the Web today.
Although the event is by invitation only, everyone at CERN will be able
to follow the event, either via a webcast at webcast.cern.ch, or
on the website of the French news channel, lci.fr. The event will also
be relayed to the Main Auditorium, the AB auditoriums in Meyrin and
Prévessin, the Council Chamber, the AT auditorium and restaurant 2.
If you have any questions you’d like to ask Tim Berners-Lee, there will
be an opportunity provided by the organizers of the Lift ’09 conference,
which took place last month in Geneva. If you have a question to ask,
you can submit it via asklift.com/www-at-20/, and the most
popular ones will be put to at the end of the afternoon.
With 2009 being declared the Year of Creativity and Innovation by the
European Union, the 20th anniversary of the Web serves as a timely
reminder of the powerful role that creativity in basic research plays as
a driver of innovation. I hope you enjoy the celebration.
Rolf Heuer