“ Most of the technology involved in the web had all been designed already ”
The inventor of the World Wide Web and one of Time Magazine ’ s ‘ 100 Most Important People of the 20th Century ’, Sir Tim Berners-Lee is one of the most influential figures in the technology world . In 1980 , Berners-Lee joined CERN in Geneva , Switzerland , where he worked as a software engineer . It was here , in 1989 , that he formulated the blueprint for the World Wide Web .
On March 12 , 1989 , Berners-Lee drafted a proposal titled “ Information Management : A Proposal ,” outlining the fundamental concepts of the World Wide Web . This proposal introduced the ideas of hypertext , URLs , and HTTP ( HyperText Transfer Protocol ), which form the backbone of the web as we know it today .. This document outlined the idea of a global hypertext system that could easily connect and access information through linked documents . This proposal laid the foundation for what we now know as the World Wide Web .
“ Most of the technology involved in the web , like the hypertext , like the Internet , multifont text objects , had all been designed already ,” Berners- Lee described in an interview with The American Academy of Achievement . “ I just had to put them together . It was a step of generalising , going to a higher level of abstraction , thinking about all the documentation systems out there as being possibly part of a larger imaginary documentation system . But then the engineering was fairly straightforward .
“ It was designed in order to make it possible to get at documentation and in order to be able to get people – students working with me , contributing to the project , for example – to be able to come in and link in their ideas , so that we wouldn ’ t lose it all if we didn ’ t debrief them before they left . Really , it was designed to be a collaborative workspace for people to design on a system together .”
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